MEMORY LANE
In 1979, STC began offering escorted vacation tours to such places as Disneyland, Vegas, Florida, Texas and the Maritimes. Those are the glory days to which Kinzel often returns when he talks so passionately about STC.
“I can’t say nothing but good about it,” says the 85-year-old, active retired Saskatoon man. He was hired in 1976 in the maintenance shops and eventually became a driver. He looks to the plaque on the clock he was given upon leaving to confirm the date: Jan. 1, 1994.
First based in Prince Albert when he started driving, he still easily lists off the towns on the route. The roughest roads were between Porcupine Plain and Hudson Bay, he recalls. Returning home to Saskatoon from Prince Albert by bus, he often encountered standing-room only.
Kinzel calls the regular passengers “my friends.” He’s proud of the service he delivered, never refusing a run and tackling all kinds of shifts and weather. “When you’re a bus driver, you take the good with the bad,” he says.
He loved the charters — a money maker that he believes subsidized some of those less-travelled rural routes — and blames politics for their end, contending private competitors bent the ear of the then-Conservative Grant Devine government.
Bourk Jenkins was also a longtime STC employee, working there for almost 28 years until his retirement in 2012. He began as a coach cleaner, and moved up to service attendant — essentially a jack of all trades. Jenkins describes his coworkers as a second family, and he still regularly stops by the Saskatoon bus garage for visits.
“It was a good place to work,” he says. “We had fun.”
He missed the company’s glory days, and often felt the looming dark clouds. Through the 1980s to the present, STC consistently lost money, and the government subsidies grew. In its 50th year, STC’s losses stood at nearly $6.2 million. Even the NDP government of the day mused about privatization.
“STC continued to struggle during 1996 with what could best be described as its dual mandate — the maintenance of a non-profitable public service within an expectation of breaking even in the financial performance,” wrote then-president Peter Glendinning in the 1996 annual report. “STC requires an examination of its role within the province.”
Jenkins says workers often heard, “Don’t be too comfortable; there’s a cheque on the table for STC.”
In announcing the closure of STC on budget day, the Saskatchewan Party government cited declining ridership, growing subsidies and high losses.
“STC was never set up as a money-making operation,” Jenkins fires back. “It was set up as a service to people.”
Elizabeth Curry, a 33-year-old Regina musician, stepped aboard a STC bus this week for a trip home to the Raymore area to visit her mom.
She first rode an STC bus alone at the age of six, and her love of the public transportation grew as she did. Those early rides were from the farm to Regina to visit a friend. In her teen years, the route was reversed, coming home each Sunday to visit her parents, her father parked and waiting for her at the turn off to the farm. On the return trip, she often had some garden produce or a jar of jam to gift the driver. As an adult, she took STC buses around the province for business and pleasure. “It’s sort of ingrained in me,” she says, calling STC “her lifeline” at times.
Curry was always struck by the array of people and their stories she heard during the bus trips — passengers going to medical appointments, students to school, families visiting loved ones in P.A.’s prison, grandparents meeting up with grandkids, newcomers heading to a job, folks from First Nations without other means to travel — their reasons as varied as the people.
Catherine Verrall is one of those grandmas who loved to travel by STC. When she moved to the province from Ontario to be closer to family in 2002, “it was a way to get to know Saskatchewan,” says the 87-year-old Regina woman, adding that she doesn’t drive and never has.
Verrall rode STC buses for practical purposes, on special journeys of discovery and bonding with her grandsons, and for “adventure trips” north. Her 80th birthday present to herself was a solo trip to Meadow Lake, just because she’d heard about it and always wanted to go there. “The bus made it possible.”
Both Verrall and Curry liken the bus service to the thread that binds a quilt. But interwoven in that fabric of this province’s people has always been the push and pull between private and public.
A stroke has slowed Verrall’s mobility but not her passion for STC. A self-described activist and “raging granny,” she recently penned an “ode to STC,” noting taxpayers subsidize many services they may never personally use, and she punctuated it with a “Save the STC” sign in her front window.
For STC, the road ahead has always been circular, the debate between public service versus public debt that began in 1946 is still not in the rear-view mirror 70 years later.