Like everyone in Northern B.C., I've travelled via Greyhound. But in one of my few truly Canadian presuppositions, I always believed that the Greyhound was beyond the reach of mere market forces or political reality, like overpriced milk and our public broadcaster. Now it has been announced that passengers in Western Canada will no longer be able to travel via the blue and silver buses: Greyhound will continue shipping but remote communities must find new wheels.
I'll leave the number crunching to the specialists. Suffice it to say that if you ask around, you will find dozens of people who worked for Greyhound over the years and they will tell you in no uncertain terms that the company was so badly managed it seemed willful. Of course, if you ever rode the bus or picked someone up from the many stops and stations along the way, it was clear no money was being put into the infrastructure: our own bus station looks positively Soviet.
Still, there is plenty of blame to go around, and I commend Greyhound's overlords for pointing a finger directly at changing market forces and new political realities that have made their general business model unsustainable. The creative destruction caused by alternatives to bussing like ride sharing and flight sales are laudable. But the recent increase in government provided transportation and subsidies sets a rather unsustainable precedent in practical policy.
Before anyone gets their tail in a knot, I'm well aware of the political and moral panic that has lead to publicly subsidized busing programs. My opinion remains that we cannot expect these tragedies to stop until our community commits to using any means necessary to capture, wound, or kill the monsters responsible for the massacre taking place on our own Highway 16. I understand this is a tall order, but it is also the justice those missing and murdered truly deserve.
Instead, we have chosen to treat the symptom rather than the disease by yet another program that looks good in the press but ultimately subtracts from the autonomy of individuals and small communities while relying on funding that will inevitably be cut in less than a decade. Already it has become clear that with public regional bussing some riders will pay more than others, or can be bumped up in the queue. That issue alone will not be endured long by anyone.
To put it another way, my constitutional right to freedom of movement is exercised with fellow citizens in trust; if that trust is broken, it follows that those trespassers must be punished, not that I am now to seek my right as an entitlement or a service from distant public servants.
To be clear, Greyhound is not to be remembered as a champion of free movement - the schedules were horrendous, the layovers unbearable. But it was a private firm that ostensibly had the quest for profits as motivation. With its demise, entrepreneurs should seek to find new ways to meet market demand. Or communities could band together, help pay a member's bus driving school fees, and build their own coach service.
Yet, instead we cling to the state's skirts.
And this admittedly is the greatest irony. The evils perpetrated on our Highway of Tears happen partly because of the economic codependency wrought by the Indian Act.
Yet leaders who fervently detest that are the champions of this new infantilization. The Greyhound was not expensive, yet these terrible murders persisted: why should we trust a state monopoly on buses will put an end to the tragedy of murdered and missing Indigenous women along Highway 16?
The Greyhound will soon be a thing of the past, another victim of the peculiar market forces and political realities of Canada. What lies in the future are the regrets the new policy will cause, as it fails to stop murders despite the removal of "systemic barriers," and all the rest. I say this to the designers of our subsidized travel: you are complicit with whatever comes next.
