With scant hours to spare before the Federal government was scheduled to hold an emergency sitting of Parliament to deal with Ottawa's record-breaking transit strike, it was over. Looking like Larry, Curly and Moe, Ottawa's Mayor Larry O'Brien and the two senior union bosses for the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279 (the drivers, mechanics and dispatchers who have been on strike against OC Transpo for over two months) emerged to announce that they had agreed to send the entire mess to binding arbitration, without any conditions attached.
For THIS we have been schlepping around the world's coldest capital city, in the coldest January in recent memory? For THIS we have wasted untold hours sitting in traffic, burned untold extra litres of fuel, paid untold parking fees, missed untold numbers of appointments, endured the wrath of an untold number of pedestrians, drivers, employers, shop keepers, appointment secretaries, wives, husbands, children, hockey coaches and hair dressers? What is there about this "solution" that could not have been achieved within 24 hours of pickets going up?
Oh, and then there is the little side bonus. We will probably get to pick up the $15,000,000.00 tab for the privilege of NOT having a transportation system available to us as the world economy crumbled, as Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year's came and went, as university exam schedules went into spasms, as retail workers who rely on the extra cash from the Christmas season spent it all and more just getting to work.
And when they say the buses are running again, of course they don't really mean it. As the buses sat idle in their sheds, or outside in the freezingness, their safety certificates expired en masse, requiring inspections and maintenance before they could get back to the business of missing their stops, breaking down, and being late as usual. we're being told it could be "many weeks" before the system is running to full capacity. I thought that OC Transpo operated buses - not space shuttles. (Although there are drivers who would disagree with me, judging by some of the rides I have had).
I don't even use the bus system on a regular basis. By the time I calculated the cost of bus passes for myself and my wife, and factored in the inconvenience of making a couple of transfers to drop off and collect our son at daycare, it became pretty clear that it was cheaper for us to just drive to work and pay for parking. That's the great irony of the whole thing, actually. Even when it's running, OC Transpo is an over-priced, under-achieving system that fails to impress. The fact that the city touts the system as being world-class strongly suggests that no one from the Ottawa city council has even been to Toronto, much less some of those cities on this Earth where transit actually works. So to be ham-strung for half the winter by an impasse between the owners of a crap transit system and the people who bring us that crap every day, was frustrating to say the least. And to think that, in the middle of a world economic meltdown, the Parliament of Canada was going to convene a special emergency session to get the buses lurching along once more simply defies the imagination. The business of the COUNTRY is being interrupted to deal with a ......BUS STRIKE?
Give us all a break.
First step - get this bus system under the control of the Ontario Government. It is ludicrous that a Federal Minister, let alone the Federal Government and Parliament as a whole, had to be called upon to get involved with this debacle.
Second step - give very serious consideration to making transit an essential service. Cities all over the country are telling residents to leave their cars at home and to take transit. Traffic patterns have been deliberately configured to favor mass transit over automobiles in many cities, Ottawa included. That may be quite proper. A good transit system can deliver tremendous benefits to a community, both in terms of convenience and environmental responsibility. But when cities tell us that we can and should rely on these systems, they should expect us to take them at their word. When we rely on transit, we choose not to have two cars - maybe no car at all. We arrange our lives with access to transit as a "given". We support infrastructure and planning initiatives that favor transit over private cars. We buy in. Fire fighting services and policing services are essential to our health, safety and well-being. And yet the average citizen relies far more heavily on transit than on fire fighting or police services in the run of the average day. Watching ambulances and fire trucks trying to negotiate the clogged Ottawa downtown during the transit strike made me wonder how anyone could think that transit, with its ability to so drastically reduce traffic congestion, is not an essential service.
Third step - get the city out of the business of providing transit, and put it in the hands of the private sector. Naturally, there would have to be regulation to ensure that routes are designed to provide service and not just generate revenue. That is clearly within the city's authority. But take the politics out of running the buses.
Fourth step - city and union, hope for forgiveness, even if you don't deserve it.
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