Oh no! They killed my Dog!

UBER-STYLE “RIDE-SHARING” COULD PLAY A ROLE. — COLBY COSH

Earlier this week, when Greyhound Canada announced that it is abandoning most of its bus routes in Western Canada, there was an amusing Twitter spasm from Toronto-based reporters looking for people potentially affected by the resulting hinterland transport crisis. Strangely, my phone remained unrung! I’m a nondriver in Edmonton whose parents live on the family homestead near Lloydminster, a few hours due east on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. I’ve depended on the Dog for trips “home,” and even for reporting assignments.

So for me, the death of Greyhound is a significant, vexing inconvenience. But, then again, Edmonton is a large capital city, and I live within commuting distance — indeed, within walking distance — of almost any service or business I can imagine needing, aside from my mother’s home-cooked meals and my father’s bad jokes. For folks in outlying communities who sometimes need to get to Edmonton, or for small-town businesses that depended on Greyhound for its freight services, this news is a much bigger deal.

Unless ... it works out for the best? I do not mean to soften you up for right-wing happy talk about how markets solve everything — not until I hear that my own possible problem getting to the border will be solved. But then again, maybe I can blame government. Alberta and Saskatchewan have different regulatory standards for passenger motor services: Lloydminster is a natural stop on an Edmonton-to-Saskatoon route, which is how I used to get to Lloyd by Greyhound, but any bus line that wants to replace Greyhound on that trip will have to follow the rules in both provinces. Making interprovincial trips easier through deregulation seems like something provincial governments can do right away — and, seriously, if any deputy ministers are reading this, please start calling around — to encourage profitable regional travel.

When Alberta deregulated intercity bus service within the province in 2011, essentially giving other companies the cue to compete with Greyhound, there were service benefits. The long-standing Red Arrow Edmontonto-Calgary corridor service, which is sort of the WestJet to Greyhound’s Air Canada, put out new tendrils to Fort McMurray and to Lethbridge and its satellites. (The Arrow is not a discount service; it is, or was, a little pricier than Greyhound, and a little more customer-focused.) Charter bus services already taking passengers from the big cities to the mountain parks got into the regular passenger trade, with benefits for travellers to towns in the western foothills.

Greyhound, however, remained in business on the longer interprovincial routes. Perhaps as a consequence, there are, for now, major blank spots on the map of Alberta when it comes to intercity bus service. The Peace River “block,” Medicine Hat, and populous east-central Alberta are not properly connected to the Calgary-Edmonton corridor.

This presents a possible opportunity, and a possible hazard, for a social-democratic Alberta government facing a 2019 election. An awful lot of physical stuff gets shifted around between the big Alberta cities and those resource-rich outlying areas. It is hard to imagine that there are no transport companies willing to bash together passenger service that at least partially replaces Greyhound’s every-day, hugevehicle, cross-subsidized business model. But the “partially” is the rub, for outof-the-way and especially Aboriginal communities, which Toronto readers should always keep in mind when there is yelping about intercity transit out West.

Uber-style “ride-sharing” could play a role (hell, I am willing to ride to Lloyd in the cab of a Peterbilt if someone wants to build some kind of Truckstop Tinder app), as could city transit agencies. Edmonton and Red Deer already have the feeble beginnings of a regional bus network. Maybe there’s some rich Alberta dude out there who just wants to redo Greyhound, more or less, with all kinds of 21st-century nimblepricing and eco-friendliness twists.

But do the Alberta New Democrats want to bet on any of that? It is hard to guess exactly what will happen, and where, with the dead hand of Greyhound’s torpid legacy business finally lifted. It would be natural for the NDP, with the Alberta budget looking healthier on the back of $72 West Texas oil, to bid for rural votes by promising to create a robust provincially run or provincially subsidized intercity bus network — like the NDP-created Crown corporation Saskatchewan euthanized last year. It’s worth remembering that Premier Rachel Notley is from the Peace country, and has already used her office to beef up higher education back home. I would bet she has racked up a lot of lifetime Greyhound mileage.

But, on the other hand, there are reasons that Saskatchewan folded up the Saskatchewan Transportation Company, and that Greyhound folded up, er, Greyhound. The big reason, in both cases, was “precipitously declining passenger numbers.” An Alberta STC — a government Greyhound — could be a financial black hole, and might be attacked as such by the United Conservative opposition.

Even for the government to spitball intercity transit ideas carries the risk of discouraging private preparations to enter the vacuum left by Greyhound (as bus companies are already proposing to do in poorer Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where intercity buses may be a more profitable “inferior good” from an economic standpoint). The NDP would no doubt like to find cheap rural votes among non-driving weirdos like me. But, as Premier Notley’s round-the-clock Stampeding has shown this week, Calgary is the core electoral battleground in 2019: the countryside has already been conceded to Jason Kenney.