Accountability missing, Perez says
The Plante administration came under fire Monday for its continued silence on the crisis plaguing the city’s fleet of buses. The Montreal Gazette published several reports last week highlighting the problematic maintenance and repairs of the roughly 1,800 buses in the Société de transport de Montréal’s fleet. Among the revelations were that buses run out of fuel daily, they break down twice or three times as frequently as those in Laval, Toronto and New York City, and that buses are routinely sent out when they are not roadworthy. When asked about the subject Monday, after reports from most of the city’s major news outlets last week, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante claimed ignorance. “I don’t even know what you are talking about right now,” Plante told a group of reporters. “I don’t know where this is coming from.” Plante was in Los Angeles last week, promoting the benefits of doing business in Montreal for that city’s film industry. The opposition blasted the Plante administration’s silence, saying if the mayor didn’t want to speak, at least Craig Sauvé, her appointee as vice-president of the STM’s board, should be giving answers to the public. “We learned that Craig Sauvé did not answer journalists’ questions about this,” Alan DeSousa, the opposition councillor who speaks on mobility issues, said at the city council meeting Monday afternoon. “Can Mr. Sauvé play the role that the Plante administration gave him and answer questions?” Sauvé replied that it was the administration’s decision to refer questions about the buses to the STM’s management, because there is a labour dispute with maintenance workers. He added that it’s rare for a bus to run out of fuel, and that this is a problem that should not occur. “As for the question of bus reliability and better maintenance, we’re working on that in our negotiations with the union so we can have better service for Montrealers,” Sauvé said. Despite promising the Montreal Gazette an interview on the subject Monday morning, Sauvé was not available to answer a reporter’s questions during the day. Sauvé also rejected repeated requests for interviews last week. Opposition leader Lionel Perez said the situation is unacceptable. “There is no reason for us to have regular interruptions of service because a bus runs out of gas,” Perez said. “It’s just nonsensical to hear that that actually happens.” He added it is up to the Plante administration to provide answers to reporters when asked about the problems. “I think that shows a lack of accountability,” Perez said. “I think they should simply speak to the managers and make sure to find a process where this (buses running out of fuel) doesn’t happen, whether it’s by including a gauge indicating the level of gas, or having it part of maintenance to check at the end of the day. These are very simple solutions that should be implemented.” STM management has given contradictory answers about the problems with the fleet, at times even going against its own data revealed in an access-to-information request. Renée Amilcar, the STM’s executive director of buses, said last week that roughly 15 per cent of the buses alert drivers when there is just 10 per cent of fuel left in the tank; the next day, both director general Luc Tremblay and a statement by the STM claimed it was roughly half the buses. The STM’s statement also claimed that, per year, an average of only 18 per cent of its buses are parked because they are being maintained or repaired, while the STM’s numbers show the rate of parked buses has hovered around 20 per cent or higher for the last five years. Tremblay and maintenance union president Gleason Frenette both admit more than 600 buses were parked over the summer, or roughly one in three, leaving the agency more than 100 buses short of what it needs to meet its service commitments. Amilcar said it’s rare for buses to run out of fuel, while Tremblay blamed the union, suggesting to the TVA network that employees were not filling up buses because they were upset about contract negotiations. In fact, STM figures provided to the Montreal Gazette on Friday showed there was an average of 1.3 reports of buses running out of fuel every day over a span of three months, accounting for two per cent of all bus breakdowns during that period.