How Greyhound cuts affect rural communities
Bus a lifeline for non-drivers, marginalized
As of 2016, 68 people lived in Grassland, Alta., a hamlet around 150 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
It’s in Athabasca County, where there’s no Via Rail station, only a regional airport; the west isn’t Central Canada, with trains flitting between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. You can either drive, take the bus or fly. In tiny Grassland, though, there’s a Greyhound stop. As of the day after Halloween, though, there won’t be: Greyhound Canada, which has been operating in Alberta since January 1930, is ending its service for all routes outside of Ontario and Quebec, save the run between Vancouver and Seattle.
There are other bus companies, it’s true — Red Arrow, a coach service in Alberta since 1979, stops in Grassland, at the Esso Family Restaurant, which Jagdish Masiwal has owned for three years. Four times a day, he said, 15 to 20 passengers unload from Greyhound buses at his restaurant for food. He expects to lose at least $300 a day because of the shutdown.
“I’m worried about it,” Masiwal said. And, it’s not just the passenger service that will affect him. The Canada Post office in Grassland is open three days a week, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., so locals rely on Greyhound for parcel service. “If my oven breaks down, if I need a part and I call Edmonton, and I get (the) part the same day. Otherwise it’s going to take two days, three days to get here,” he said.
Some 107 communities in Alberta will lose Greyhound service because of the shutdown, 334 in total from the Rocky Mountains to the Ontario border. The company said there has been a 41 per cent decline in ridership since 2010; in Manitoba, it was a 57 per cent decline. Peter Hamel, Greyhound’s regional vicepresident for Western Canada, said the cargo service has lost $35 million worth of business since 2010. “The e-commerce, and the Amazons, who are doing their own shipping, continue to erode the business we have,” Hamel said.
Hamel said there are simply fewer riders coming from rural areas, and competition, particularly in British Columbia, with subsidized carriers such as BC Transit, a Crown corporation, has harmed ridership.
Bus services also face competition from low-cost airlines, such as Swoop and Flair Air. This means longer inter-city runs — such as the 16-hour trip between Edmonton and Kelowna, B.C., which costs $92.20 to travel next Thursday — are in competition with a 45-minute flight within a similar price range. The Flair Air fare for that day is $119. “They’re starting to play in a sandbox that they never used to,” Hamel said. “These are markets that were predominantly Greyhound.”
As of 2016, there were more than 3.5 million cars on Alberta’s roads, but, considering a population of 4.3 million as of January 2018, many Albertans don’t drive. For many, Greyhound was a way to travel, a way to see family and for some even a literal lifeline. Jan Reimer, the executive director of the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters, said she’s known of women who’ve used the Greyhound network to escape domestic abuse.
“Many women who are abused, you know, financial abuse is part of it; they don’t have keys to the car, they know they have to get out of there if they want to stay alive. Greyhound and the bus has been something that they can afford and that they’ve used,” Reimer said.
Along the Highway of Tears — a 720-kilometre stretch of highway in British Columbia from Prince George to Prince Rupert —
STARTING TO PLAY IN A SANDBOX THAT THEY NEVER USED TO.
the lack of transportation has been cited as a factor in the disappearance or murder of at least 18 women and girls, many of them Indigenous, as instead they turned to hitchhiking.
And for seniors, especially those who don’t drive, coach buses are the best way around the province, to see family or even get to medical appointments available only in larger centres, said Ruth Adria, with the Elder Advocates of Alberta Society. “It’s extremely important because smaller centres have no transportation whatsoever,” Adria said. “When individuals have to ask others for rides, it becomes very difficult for them.”
More than 400 people will lose their jobs as a result of the cuts. All assets, such as buses, Hamel said, will be moved to Ontario to serve those routes. More than 650,000 people rode the Greyhound each year in British Columbia, 380,000 in Alberta; all totalled, the cuts in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and parts of Ontario will affect around two million riders.
On Monday, Brian Mason, Alberta’s transport minister, called on the federal government to propose a “national solution that keeps Canadians connected across the country.” At a press conference on trucking safety Tuesday afternoon, Mason didn’t rule out — but didn’t commit to either — a subsidized bus service, saying Alberta had reached out to other affected provinces, and suggested the federal government could have a role to play in interprovincial bus lines.
The Greyhound pullout also presents, perhaps, an opportunity for Greyhound competitors such as Red Arrow. It operates routes mainly along the north-south corridor from Fort McMurray, 435 kilometres north of Edmonton down to Lethbridge, around 200 kilometres south of Calgary.
In Slave Lake, Alta., nearly three hours north of Edmonton, Mayor Tyler Warman knows what it’s like to lose bus services. Greyhound cut its route through the town of around 6,000 people in 2011.
In particular, he said, that loss mattered for medical appointments, many of which are at hospitals in Edmonton.
“It’s definitely a frustration, because there is a significant group of people out there who have either income pressures, or you know, just don’t have the equipment to physically go whenever they need to go and they rely on some form of public transportation,” Warman said.
Lorne Young, the mayor of Elk Point, a town of 1,600 around 200 kilometres from Edmonton, hopes there might be some noise made this time around. “One of the challenges we faced at the time when we lost the service was, well, we’re just small town Alberta, we really don’t have much of a voice,” said Young, adding he expects there will be discussions with government about providing these services.
“But, you know, having said that, I suspect also what’s going to happen ... is a private carrier will set up a business and between hauling people and hauling freight try to turn it into a lucrative business. I’m seriously hoping that’s what happens.”