Groups offer funding solutions for Quebec's strapped public transit sector

A coalition of organizations is calling for concrete funding solutions for Quebec's public transit sector.

 L'Alliance TRANSIT is proposing a series of measures to elected officials, including indexing the fuel tax and charging motorists for the kilometres they drive.

Made up of more than 60 organizations, the coalition warns that transport companies could face a $900 million deficit by 2026.

"The current funding system for public transit is broken, and we need to fix it," said Marc-André Viau, director of government relations at Equiterre.

To counter that deficit, l'Alliance TRANSIT is suggesting new solutions and hoping to update some old ones.

"The reality is that investments are increasing from year to year, and revenues are lacking," said Angèle Pineau-Lemieux, spokesperson for Accès Transports Viables. "There was one source of revenue, and that was the ticket we paid when we go on public transit."

Modifying the province's gas tax has been one of the coalition's top priorities, because it was last updated in 2013.

"During that time, there has been a 28 per cent increase in inflation" while "revenues have been frozen," said Florence Junca-Adenot, a transport expert and professor at UQAM's urban and tourism studies department.

Because more people are buying electric cars, further reducing the fuel tax revenue, l'Alliance TRANSIT is proposing to eventually replace it with a kilometre-based charge to finance public transport. This measure would impose a fee for the use of a vehicle according to the number of kilometres travelled.

"The contribution, based on the number of kilometres travelled, can be modulated according to the time of day, the place of travel, the type of vehicle used and even the distance threshold reached. It could be more economical to travel in a compact vehicle, outside peak hours, and as long as you have not reached 15,000 kilometres in a year, for example," the authors of the report point out.

The coalition is also calling for a non-residential parking tax in all Quebec cities.

Currently, Montreal is the only city in the province to have such a tax, generating over $20 million annually.

Another area for possible revenue is vehicle registrations. Since 1992, drivers have contributed to public transit funding through a $30 payment on their vehicle registration, but again, this contribution has not kept pace with inflation.

"Those are examples of what we can do now with what we already have and what we can do that is ready to go," she said.

The coalition said the transport minister's five-year plan to fix the sector's financial crisis needs to be revised if they want to ensure a reliable service for those taking public transit.

"We have so many projects we want to go forward with. We have so many new investments we want to do in our public transit, but we right now don't have the capacity to operate what we actually have," said Pineau-Lemieux.

Other measures that l'Alliance TRANSIT is suggesting to the government include road tolls and a fee-for-service system. Also known as a "bonus-malus," the system would allow giving a bonus to the purchaser of a new vehicle that consumes less fuel than the one they owned before. Conversely, an additional tax would be imposed on purchasing a large gas-guzzling vehicle.

L'Alliance TRANSIT has long been asking the government to rebalance investments between the road network and the public transit network, since the road network is getting $31.5 billion of investments planned for the next decade, more than double the $13.8 billion earmarked for public transit in the Quebec Infrastructure Plan.

Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility Geneviève Guilbault has begun a consultation tour across the province "in order to find a sustainable and thoughtful solution to the issues surrounding the structural financing of public transit."

She is set to meet with elected officials and representatives of public transit companies.

With files from The Canadian Press