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This chapter delves into the intricacies of public transit governance in Canada, with a particular focus on the three most populous provinces: Ontario, Québec, and British Columbia. It explores the governance and financing of transit operations, highlighting the operational autonomy and fiscal constraints of local transit systems. The chapter also reviews efforts to develop integrated regional transit governance in Canada's largest cities, noting the varied outcomes in different urban areas. Additionally, it examines the recent boom in rapid transit construction, focusing on how the politicization of transit infrastructure has created challenges for the development of new transit lines in urban Canada. The chapter concludes by discussing the widespread challenges facing transit governance in Canada, including the need to diversify sources of operating revenue and the politicization of intergovernmental grants for rapid transit infrastructure.
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Abstract
This chapter provides a broad overview of the governance of public transit systems in Canada. Transit plays a relatively minor role in the overall Canadian transportation system, due to a combination of geographical and policy factors. Nonetheless, public transit is an important mode of transport in large Canadian cities. In legal terms, public transit is a responsibility of Canada’s provinces, but all provinces except for one in turn delegate this responsibility to municipal governments. This jurisdictional decentralization, together with the lack of general-purpose transit legislation in most provinces, means that the structure and governance of transit systems varies widely across cities. Transit operations depend heavily on fare box revenues, and the steep decline in ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic has produced a lingering operating revenue crisis. The capital funding situation is more positive, since all three levels of government have recently invested significant funds in expanding urban transit infrastructure. However, the vertical and horizontal fragmentation of transit governance in some city-regions has politicized, complicated and delayed the construction of new high-capacity transit lines. The chapter examines these issues and challenges with a specific focus on the three largest city-regions in Canada: Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, which provided current data on revenues and ridership across Canadian urban transit systems that underpin some of the analyses in this chapter.
4.1 Introduction
Canada is a large country, in which long distances and low population densities create a challenging environment for the development of public transit systems. Transit use in Canada is highly concentrated in the largest urban centres. However, the decentralized character of Canadian federalism means that there is no one model or set of principles that structures transit governance. In order to provide a concise overview of transit governance in Canada, this chapter focuses on the three largest Canadian provinces by population—Ontario, Québec, and British Columbia—and, within them, on the three largest urban areas—Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver. It discusses the governance and financing of transit operations, noting that local transit systems are at once operationally autonomous and fiscally constrained. It reviews efforts to develop integrated regional transit governance in Canada’s largest cities, a process that had very different outcomes in different urban areas. Finally, the chapter examines the recent boom in rapid transit construction, focusing on how the politicization of transit infrastructure has created challenges for the development of new transit lines in urban Canada.
4.2 The Role of Public Transit in the Canadian Transportation System
Canada’s passenger transport system is based largely around private vehicles. Public transit does play an important role, especially in large urban areas, but its prevalence is low in comparative perspective. In 2021, 7.7% of commuting trips in Canada were made by transit, compared with 83.9% by car (Statistics Canada, 2022a). While these figures in part reflect the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to a major drop in public transport use across many countries starting in 2020 (Qi et al., 2023), the share of Canadians who get around by public transit has long been lower than in most other wealthy industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States and Australia (Perl, Hern and Kenworthy 2020, 59–61). This limited role is the product of two interacting factors: low population density, and decades of automobile-centered transportation and land use planning policies.
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Canada is a highly urbanized country. 72% of the population lives in urban centres with more than 100,000 residents (Statistics Canada, 2022b). But population density within urban centres is low by global standards (Xu et al., 2020). The product of a “land-rich” environment (Xu et al., 2020) and urban planning practices that have prioritized single family housing development and automobile-based urban transportation systems since the 1950s (Perl et al., 2020), low urban population densities make the provision of public transit more challenging and expensive on a per capita basis. However, there is a direct relationship between population and density in Canada—the larger a city-region is, the denser it tends to be. This in turn correlates strongly with transit use. While all Canadian urban areas with more than 50,000 people have some form of public transit service, the largest urban areas in Canada are the most densely populated and have the highest rates of public transit use, as Fig. 4.1 shows. As a result, actual transit use is highly concentrated in the largest city-regions. In 2022, the public transit agencies serving the Vancouver, Montréal and Toronto urban areas—which together house about 29% of Canada’s population—accounted for 83% of all public transit trips taken in the country (calculated from Canadian Urban Transit Association, 2024a).
Fig. 4.1
Population density and commuting by transit in Canada’s 15 largest urban areas. (Notes: The size of each circle represents the population of the urban area. All data are for 2021. Source: Calculated by the author from Statistics Canada (2022a). Population density data are for “population centres”, which reflect contiguous built-up areas, rather than municipal boundaries)
Public transit plays little to no role in inter-city and rural transportation in Canada. While numerous private operators provide inter-city bus services, with a few exceptions (notably, in some areas of British Columbia), there are no public inter-city bus services. Inter-city passenger trains were quite extensive several decades ago, but they have been repeatedly scaled back and are now limited to the heavily populated corridor between Windsor, Ontario and Québec City, and service frequencies are low. The vast majority of inter-city passenger trips occur by private vehicle, and even air travel dwarfs train use. In 2022, for instance, Canada’s nationally owned passenger train service, VIA Rail, carried 3.3 million passengers, whereas domestic air travel accounted for 74.1 million passengers (VIA Rail, 2023; Statistics Canada, 2023a).
Some smaller urban centres in Canada have modest public transit systems, but many do not. Outside British Columbia, there appears to be no local transit service in any municipality with less than 10,000 inhabitants.1 A combination of highly dispersed settlement patterns, weak public demand, and lack of support by supra-local governments has, to date, presented insurmountable obstacles to the development of rural public transit in most of the country (Sutherland & Breen, 2022). This may be beginning to change. Among other things, in 2021 the Federal government launched a $250 million, five-year funding program aimed at supporting local authorities who want to build rural transit infrastructure (Infrastructure Canada, 2023). For the moment, however, public transit in Canada remains an overwhelmingly urban service. Indeed, Canada’s only national association of transit authorities is called the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA—see https://cutaactu.ca/).
As we will see in the next section, the governance of public transit in Canada is highly decentralized. Together with varied geographical patterns of settlement, this decentralization produces great inter-provincial variation in the prevalence of transit, seen in Table 4.1. In general, public transit is used much more heavily in more populous provinces, which contain larger urban areas. However, the relationship is not uniform, with British Columbia being an obvious outlier—it ranks third in terms of population, but first in terms of the proportion of the population that uses public transit. This suggests that provincial policies might play a role in producing inter-provincial differences. Let us turn, then, to questions of governance and policy.
Table 4.1
Proportion of public transit commuters by Canadian province, 2023
4.3 Canadian Public Transit: Decentralized and Politicized Governance
The governance of transit in Canada is shaped by the distinctive territorial and legal characteristics of the Canadian state. Transportation is a shared area of federal-provincial jurisdiction, but public transit systems are generally considered to be within provincial jurisdiction (Transport Canada, 2023). As a result, federal activity in the field is limited. Canada’s inter-city passenger rail service, VIA Rail, is the only public transportation service operated by the federal government. As we will see later, the federal government has in recent years introduced significant funding programs to build new urban transit infrastructure, so its main involvement is in the realm of capital funding, not transit operations.
The constitutional assignment of jurisdiction over transit to provinces does not come with any stipulation on how provinces are to exercise their authority in the field. For the most part, provinces have chosen to delegate responsibility for transit to municipalities, but in concrete terms the governance of transit takes many different forms across the country. All Canadian provinces except for Québec operate under a common law system, in which governance arrangements are primarily the product of accumulated political decisions, rather than flowing from a codified set of legal-administrative principles. There are thus no generalizable written criteria or principles that structure the assignment of responsibilities and the design of governance arrangements for public transit in Canada. Instead, the governance of transit varies significantly both across and within individual provinces, having developed in different ways in response to locally differing sets of political and policy pressures. As Wood notes, “Canada’s transportation governance structures and practices are uneven [and] inconsistent” (Wood, 2023, 11).
At a very basic level there is some inter-provincial congruence. All ten provinces have passed general-purpose municipal legislation, and nine of them use it to delegate responsibility over transit to municipalities—either as a “sphere of responsibility”, or as a list of specified powers (Wood, 2023; Taylor & Dobson, 2020). The exception is British Columbia, where primary responsibility for public transit rests at the provincial level. In addition, Québec and British Columbia have legislation that lays out standardized principles for the organization of public transit authorities. Most provinces, however, do not have such legislation, instead leaving it up to municipal authorities to decide how transit systems are to be governed. And even in Québec and British Columbia, as we will see, the largest public transit systems—in the Montréal and Vancouver regions—are governed by special legislation.
The governance of public transit in Canada is thus highly decentralized and varied. Indeed, it is not even clear how many public transit operators there are in the country since no federal body gathers this information. The Canadian Urban Transit Association currently has 135 member agencies, of which more than half (72) are in Ontario (CUTA, 2024a); but quite a few smaller transit operators, especially in British Columbia and Québec, are not CUTA members. According to Statistics Canada, in 2020 a total of 218 municipalities across the country owned public transit assets (Statistics Canada, 2022c). Regardless, as we saw earlier, transit use is highly concentrated in the largest urban areas, and the ten largest transit agencies in Canada account for more than 90% of all transit trips (calculated from CUTA, 2024a).
4.4 Governing and Financing Transit Operations
The decentralization and politicization of transit governance in Canada means that we cannot identify a generally applicable set of principles and practices that structure the governance of transit. Given this, our discussion of how transit operations are governed and financed will focus on Canada’s three largest provinces by population—Ontario, Québec and British Columbia—and within these three provinces, on the largest urban areas—Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver.
The legal foundations for transit governance are different in Ontario, Québec and British Columbia. In Ontario, transit is delegated to municipalities in the Municipal Act, but there is no provincial legislation that specifies how municipalities should govern transit, which is left to local discretion. Local transit systems are operated either directly or indirectly by individual municipalities, with budgets, fares, schedules and levels of service all determined locally. Many larger systems, including those in Ottawa, Hamilton and Mississauga, are run directly as administrative departments or divisions of the municipality. However, in other instances, transit is run by an arm’s length agency overseen by the municipality. This is the case in Toronto, where the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)—by far the largest transit agency in the province—is directed by a governing board made up of local politicians and citizen representatives, appointed by Toronto’s city council (Toronto Transit Commission, 2024).
In Québec, transit governance is somewhat more standardized than in Ontario. A provincial law passed in 2001, the Act respectingpublic transitauthorities (Government of Québec, 2023), creates nine local transit authorities in the province’s largest urban areas. Most of these authorities existed prior to the adoption of the Act, but the Act standardized their governance arrangements. All nine are constituted as arm’s length agencies, and the municipalities that they serve appoint a mix of local politicians and citizen representatives to their governing boards. As in Ontario, budgets, fares, schedules and levels of service are under local control. There are, however, also transit agencies in smaller urban centers that are not subject to the Act and are governed in varying ways. Furthermore, as we will see, in the Montréal area there is a complex web of transit agencies; some are constituted by the Act, others by special legislation.
British Columbia (BC) is the only province in Canada where public transit is largely managed by the provincial government. Provincial involvement with transit in BC dates back more than 100 years, and for several decades, transit delivery was a responsibility of BC Hydro, the provincial power generation company. In 1983 the province created BC Transit, a crown corporation (that is, specialized government agency) that coordinates and manages transit delivery across most of BC. BC Transit oversees the planning, financial and operating practices of 60 local transit agencies throughout the province. Services are usually provided through “a partnership between BC Transit, local government, and a contracted transit operating company” (BC Transit, 2024), with local Councils setting budgets and fares, subject to provincial regulations and standards. However, as we will see later, the largest transit system in BC by far—the one in the Vancouver area—is governed by separate legislation and is not part of the BC Transit network.
Across Canada, levels of service, fares and schedules are set locally. Canadian local governments thus have significant operational autonomy over transit delivery. However, they also depend largely on local revenue sources (as opposed to dedicated intergovernmental transfers) to fund transit operations, and the structure of these local revenue sources often results in unpredictable and/or constrained operating funds, limiting service delivery choices in practice. Comprehensive data on transit revenues at the provincial or federal level are not collected, unfortunately, but we can get a sense of the structure of operating revenues by examining recent data for Canada’s three largest transit agencies.
Revenues from transit operations—that is, fare revenues—are among the main local source of operating funds for Canadian transit systems. Figure 4.2 shows the share of fare revenues vs. other sources of revenue for transit agencies in Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. The proportions are not fully comparable across agencies due to differences in accounting—in Toronto, the figures represent operating funds only, whereas in Montréal and Vancouver, operating and capital funds are combined, so the figures underestimate the importance of fare revenues for operations, especially in the case of TransLink, which has managed several major transit infrastructure projects in recent years.2 Notwithstanding, it is clear that until the Covid-19 pandemic undermined transit use, all three agencies relied heavily on fare revenues.
Fig. 4.2
Fare revenues vs. other revenues, “big three” transit agencies. (Source: Calculated from annual reports and financial statements of the respective transit agencies)
Subsidies from municipal budgets are another common source of local transit revenue (Eidelman et al., 2023). In 2019, for example, municipal subsidies made up 31 percent of the operating funds of the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) in Montréal (ARTM, 2021, 14), and 17 percent of the TTC’s operating funds (Toronto Transit Commission, 2020, 18). Heavy reliance on municipal subsidies makes transit funding vulnerable to changing political priorities, making long-range operational planning more difficult. However, not all Canadian transit agencies depend on the fickle largesse of municipal councils. Vancouver’s TransLink did not receive any general municipal subsidies in 2019. This is because, unlike most other Canadian transit agencies, TransLink has the power to levy a range of local taxes, including a fuel tax, a property tax, a parking tax and a levy on electricity use (TransLink, 2013a, 4).
Intergovernmental subsidies for transit operations vary by province and locality, but always account for a minority of revenues. In 2019, intergovernmental transfers accounted for 16 percent of operating funds in Vancouver (TransLink, 2020, 21), 14 percent in Montréal (ARTM, 2021, 14), and less than 4 percent in the case of the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission, 2020, 40). Historically, the federal government has not been involved in providing operating subsidies, leaving this task to the provinces. However, this shifted in 2020 with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Fig. 4.3 shows, ridership on large urban transit systems plummeted after the start of the pandemic and did not come close to recovering to pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Statistics Canada data based on a sample of large transit providers indicates that ridership averaged 61.5% of pre-pandemic levels in 2022 and 77.4% in 2023, suggesting a slow and difficult recovery in transit modal share (calculated from Statistics Canada, 2024).
Fig. 4.3
Annual ridership, 2019–2022, six largest Canadian transit agencies. (Source: Calculated from CUTA, 2024a)
Given the operational dependence of transit agencies on fare revenues, the sudden drop in ridership resulted in a fiscal crisis for transit operators across Canada. The federal government rolled out pandemic relief funding in October 2020, which included $4.3 billion in emergency operating subsidies for transit. The relief funding was renewed in early 2022, but by early 2023 it had run out. As we will see later, the federal government has in recent years become heavily involved in supporting the construction of new transit infrastructure, but it has thus far resisted calls to provide longer-term funding support for transit operations (CBC News, 2024a; CUTA, 2024b). In 2023, as ridership stubbornly remained below pre-pandemic levels, Canadian transit systems “collectively faced unfunded operational shortfalls estimated at over three quarters of a billion dollars” (CUTA, 2024b). As of 2024, major transit systems have been kept running with ad-hoc annual provincial handouts to cover revenue shortfalls, but service levels have also been reduced in a number of major cities, raising fears that transit may enter a negative spiral of worsening service and decreasing ridership unless the broader operational funding model is shifted away from reliance on fare revenues (Davis, 2023).
4.5 Regional Transit Governance
As Wood notes, in many large city-regions around the world, transit and transportation is governed by “an arm’s-length regional authority that coordinates the planning, funding, and operations of multiple modes of transportation for several municipalities with the involvement of several levels of government”. In Canada, however, such a model is “neither common nor well developed” (2023, 11). Instead, the decentralized and politicized character of transit governance has led to different regional governance models emerging over time out of the distinct historical interplay of politics and policy in specific cities.
Regional transit governance systems can be designed to address two common kinds of coordination challenges: Horizontal and vertical. Horizontal coordination challenges typically emerge when there are multiple municipalities in one urban area, which necessitates the coordination of transit planning, development, and operations across municipal boundaries. In some Canadian cities—including Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Halifax, London (Ontario), and others—the horizonal challenge is minimized because one municipality contains all or most of the urban population. However, the Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver urban areas are all polycentric, containing dozens of local municipalities. Vertical coordination challenges emerge when multiple levels of government are involved with transit systems. In Canada capital funding for new transit infrastructure comes mostly from the provincial and federal governments, so vertical coordination challenges are particularly evident with respect to the planning and construction of new transit infrastructure, which we will discuss in the next section.
Table 4.2 presents a comparative overview of transit governance in Canada’s three largest city-regions. The contrast between regionally consolidated governance in the Vancouver area and more fragmented governance models in Toronto and Montréal is clearly apparent. These differing arrangements have emerged over time out of a distinct interplay of transit needs and local and provincial political interests. In each case, there has been a complex and dynamic but clearly discernible relationship between the evolution of governance arrangements in the city-region as a whole, and the evolution of transit governance specifically.
Table 4.2
Transit Agencies in the Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal Urban Regions
Agency
Ridership
(2022, M)
Scale
Who appoints governing board?
Infrastructure development?
Operational responsibilities
Metro Vancouver
TransLink
192
Regional
TransLink Mayors’ Council (7) and Province of British Columbia (2)
Yes (including major road infrastructure)
All transit modes—“SkyTrain” urban rail, bus, SeaBus
Greater Toronto Area
Metrolinx
38
Regional
Province of Ontario
Yes
Commuter rail and airport rail link
Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)
319
Municipal
Toronto City Council
Yes (until 2019)
Subway, bus, streetcar
Mississauga Transit
36
Municipal
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
Brampton Transit
31
Municipal
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
York Region Transit
16
Sub-regional
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
Durham Region Transit
7
Sub-regional
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
Burlington Transit
3
Municipal
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
Oakville Transit
2
Municipal
No board—Run directly by the city
No
Bus
Montréal Metropolitan Community
Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM)
n/a
Regional
Montréal Metropolitan Community (8) and Province of Québec (7)
Yes (including major road infrastructure)
None—Coordinates the activity of other transit agencies
Société de Transport de Montréal (STM)
294
Sub-regional
Montréal Agglomeration Council
No
Subway, bus
Société de transport de Laval
16
Municipal
Laval City Council
No
Bus
Société de Transport de Longueuil
14
Sub-regional
Longueuil Agglomeration Council
No
Bus
EXO
37
Sub-regional
Multiple municipalities
No
Bus
REM (operating from 2023)
n/a
Sub-regional
CDPQ (3) and Province of Québec (2)
Yes
Commuter rail
Sources: Ridership data are from CUTA, 2024a and (for smaller agencies) from individual agency websites; all other data are from Horak & Taylor, 2023 and individual transit agency websites
Vancouver has a long history of regional planning and governance (Taylor, 2019). The urban area is governed by 21 local municipalities and an upper-tier regional government—Metro Vancouver—that is responsible for planning, water, waste, sewage, and affordable housing. Metro, which was originally established as the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) in 1967, is run by a board of politicians appointed by and from the councils of local municipalities. Transit is also regionally integrated, but it is managed by a separate, special purpose agency, TransLink. TransLink was founded in 1999 when the provincial government, which had controlled regional transit in Vancouver for several decades through a series of special-purpose authorities, was looking to divest itself of funding responsibility for the expansion of Vancouver’s transit infrastructure (TransLink, 2013a).
TransLink operates all forms of public transit across the Vancouver area, and it also plans and develops new capital infrastructure, such as rapid transit lines. As we noted earlier, TransLink has the power to levy a range of local taxes, which support both operating and capital expenses. It is governed by a board of nine non-politicians. Seven of them are appointed by the TransLink Mayors’ Council, and the other two by the BC provincial government. The Council, which sets long-range plans and financing strategies, includes the mayors of all 21 lower-tier municipalities, with voting weighted by population (TransLink, 2024). TransLink is thus primarily responsible to local politicians in the Vancouver area. While it is sometimes criticized for its complex internal governance arrangements and it has faced revenue shortfalls for its capital plans (see next section), TransLink is by far the strongest regional transit authority in Canada.
In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), by contrast, there is no multipurpose regional government. Instead, there are 25 local municipalities. At the core of the urban area is the huge central City of Toronto, with about three million inhabitants. The remaining 24 local municipalities, which are located in the newer suburbs that surround the core city, are grouped into four “regions”—York, Durham, Peel and Halton—each of which has its own upper-tier government. Unlike in Vancouver, there is no history of planning and governing institutions that span the whole GTA, and no institutional connection between the City of Toronto and the suburbs that surround it.
As Table 4.2 shows, there are five transit agencies in the GTA that operate only within one municipality. They include the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), Canada’s largest agency in terms of ridership, which operates in the City of Toronto.3 There are also two sub-regional transit agencies, which are operated by two of the four upper-tier governments in the suburbs, and which each cover several local municipalities. Of the seven local and sub-regional agencies, only the TTC is run as an arm’s-length body with a governing board.
There was no regional transit authority in the GTA until 2006, when the provincial government established Metrolinx with a mandate to run the provincially-owner commuter rail system and to “plan, finance and develop an integrated regional transportation network” (Horak, 2021). Although Metrolinx now operates both the commuter rail system and an airport rail link, most transit operations remain under the control of the seven local agencies, as Table 4.2 shows. Metrolinx has little power to influence these operations, since operating funds do not flow through it, and local agencies retain the authority to determine schedules, levels of service, and—until February 2024—fares as well (CBC News, 2024b).
For most of its existence, Metrolinx has been provincially controlled. It was initially governed by a board dominated by municipal appointees. However, the Toronto region has little history of interaction between the City of Toronto and the outer suburbs, and the board was plagued by infighting over priorities. In 2009 the province restructured it, replacing local appointees with provincial ones (Horak, 2021, 252). There is thus no institutional connection between Metrolinx and the city councils that manage municipal and sub-regional transit agencies.
In addition, and in contrast to TransLink, Metrolinx has no autonomous taxing authority, so it depends largely on provincial capital grants for its multi-billion-dollar annual budget. Metrolinx manages all major rapid transit infrastructure projects in the GTA suburbs. Until 2019, some transit projects in the City of Toronto were managed by Metrolinx and others by the TTC; but in 2019, the province “uploaded” all responsibility for rapid transit construction in the city to Metrolinx. As of 2020, Metrolinx had spent about $27 billion building new transit infrastructure (Horak 2021, 251). As we will see in the next section, however, the institutional disconnect between Metrolinx and local city councils has often made this process messy and difficult.
The Montréal region has a complex governance system. There are 82 municipalities in the region, of which the City of Montréal (population 1.8 million) is by far the largest. The City is in turn subdivided into 19 Boroughs, each with its own elected council. At a broader scale, the Urban Agglomeration of Montréal, which covers the Island of Montréal, includes the City of Montréal and 14 other smaller municipalities. Beyond the Island there are several dozen suburban municipalities, large and small, on the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence River. Finally, the Montréal Metropolitan Community (MMC), a weak regional planning authority established by the provincial government in 2001, covers the whole urban region (Taylor, 2020). Governing tasks are thus divided among multiple tiers, but primary political authority lies with local municipalities, since the governing councils of the Montréal Urban Agglomeration and the Montréal Metropolitan Community are both made up of mayors and councilors from local municipalities, with representation weighted by population.
Transit governance in Montréal reflects the multi-layered structure of metropolitan governance, and has been subject to many rounds of restructuring over the decades. During the second half of the twentieth century, public transit on the Island of Montréal was consolidated under one locally-run agency, while numerous agencies served the off-island suburbs. In 1996, the Québec provincial government created the Agence Metropolitaine de Transport (AMT), a provincially controlled regional transportation agency with a mandate to coordinate transit delivery among local providers, and to plan and develop new transit infrastructure and major roads. The AMT was given access to dedicated taxes, including a fuel tax for transit operations and a share of local property taxes for capital works, which it collected and redistributed to local transit agencies, which continued to run all transit operations (TransLink, 2013b).
In 2016, the province replaced AMT with the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM). Control was shifted towards local government, with the MMC Council appointing 8 of the 15 positions on the ARTM’s Board of Directors, and the province appointing 7. At the same time, the provincial government consolidated seven small suburban transit operators and the commuter rail system into one new operating agency, EXO (ARTM , 2024). This left four transit operators in the Montréal region, one serving a single municipality, and three others serving multiple municipalities. By far the largest operator in terms of ridership is the Société de Transport de Montréal (STM), which serves the Island of Montréal.
The ARTM is thus designed as a relatively strong upper-tier authority in an integrated two-tier transit governance system. However, in 2015, just before the government established the ARTM, it also launched the construction of an electrified suburban rail system, the Réseau électrique métropolitain (REM). The REM is being built as a “public-public” partnership between the Government of Québec and the province’s pension fund manager, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ). The ARTM has no control over the project, despite its nominal role as the regional transportation planning body. As Roy notes, “by entrusting the CDPQ with the mandate to design, build and operate … the REM, the Québec government is bypassing the ARTM by imposing on it a major public transit project that it had not chosen” (Roy, 2022, 12). The development of the REM, by far the largest transit project tin Montréal in recent years, has undermined the ARTM’s ability to act as a regional transportation planner and given rise to new coordination challenges and inter-agency conflicts at the very time when an integrated system of regional transit governance appeared to be on the verge of consolidation (Roy, 2022).
All three of Canada’s largest city-regions have thus seen initiatives to develop regional transportation authorities in recent years. The results have arguably been strongest in Vancouver, with its long history of regional collaboration, and weakest in Toronto, where Metrolinx has become a dependent arm of the provincial government, rather than a mechanism for intermunicipal coordination and cooperation. One reason why progress towards regionally integrated transit governance has been halting and uneven is that provincial governments, who have both a financial and a political stake in big city transit, are reluctant to cede control, and periodically intervene to protect or advance their own political interests. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the dynamics of transit infrastructure construction.
4.6 Governing the Development of Rapid Transit
While transit operating costs are largely locally funded, local governments rely mostly on intergovernmental grants for capital projects. In the 1980s and 90 s such grants were scarce, and little new transit infrastructure was built. Canadian cities continued to grow, however, and along with them their traffic problems. Responding to a growing infrastructure deficit, provincial and federal governments got back into the business of infrastructure grants in the new millennium, and over the past 15 years there has been something of a boom in the construction of new rapid transit infrastructure in Canadian cities. However, in many instances this process has been messy and contentious, with rapid transit initiatives subject to delays and reversals.
Several factors make the implementation of new rapid transit initiatives challenging in many Canadian cities. First, provincial and federal political parties do not operate in local politics, which either is non-partisan, or has distinct local political parties. This makes it more difficult to sustain intergovernmental agreement on infrastructure priorities. Second, administrative communication and coordination across levels of government is weakly institutionalized (Horak, Forthcoming), further accentuating vertical coordination challenges. Third, intergovernmental infrastructure funding is generally distributed on a project basis, rather than as formula-based transfers, which gives non-local governments the chance to use infrastructure grants to pursue their own short-term political interests. Finally, the weak development of metropolitan transit authorities further enhances opportunities for politicians—both provincial and local—to prioritize immediate political goals over longer-term policy considerations in making choices about rapid transit infrastructure (Horak, 2021, 248).
Nowhere has this triumph of politics over policy been more evident than in the City of Toronto. In 2007 the City, under mayor David Miller, responded to the availability of new provincial infrastructure funding by proposing a plan to build six new light rail lines. The plan was well received by transit experts, and the provincial government pledged to fund it, but before construction had started, a new mayor—Rob Ford—was elected on a promise to scrap the plan, and instead build one subway to avoid taking road space away from cars (Silver et al., 2020). Ford’s plan made little sense from a transit perspective, but the provincial government deferred to local politics and five of the six light rail lines in the Miller light rail plan were shelved. In 2014, yet another mayor—John Tory—was elected with a promise to build yet another, different rapid transit line, while Ford’s subway remained on the drawing board, and construction of one light rail line from the Miller era continued at a snail’s pace, hobbled by disputes over details between Metrolinx and the TTC (Horak 2021, 251).
The saga of successive and largely unrealized rapid transit plans in Toronto continued until 2019, when a new Conservative provincial government suddenly produced its own proposal for yet another new subway line. The province then reached an agreement with the city, whereby Metrolinx would manage all rapid transit construction, and the provincial government promised to fully fund four rapid transit lines, comprising a mix of old and new subway and light rail proposals (StrategyCorp, 2019). For now, this arrangement seems to have held, and there is some progress on construction, but after nearly 20 years of effort, not a single new rapid transit line is yet in operation in Toronto. Lacking its own revenue base and autonomous planning powers, Metrolinx remains an instrument of the provincial government, and transit construction in Toronto remains vulnerable to political reversals and uncertain funding commitments.
In Montréal, the provincial government has created an ironic circumstance in which the ARTM, regional transit planning and construction body that it created in 2016, does not manage the largest rapid transit expansion project in the city, the REM. The REM is a 67-kilometre light rail system connecting the airport, the city centre, and the southern and western suburbs of Montréal. The first segment opened in 2023 and has attracted international attention for being built quickly and at a relatively low cost (English, 2023). The governance of the project has been centralized in one entity—an infrastructure subsidiary of the CDPQ, which the province exempted from local planning consultation requirements—and it has had strong political support from both the premier of Québec and the mayor of Montréal. Together, these factors have enabled rapid and relatively cost-effective construction so far (English, 2023).
However, a planned eastern extension of the REM ran into major public opposition, ultimately leading the CDPQ to withdraw from the project in 2022. The ARTM, which had criticized the CDPQ’s plans for the eastern extension, was put in charge of producing a revised version. In 2023, it unveiled a plan that addressed resident concerns by putting the whole project underground but tripled its price tag to $36 billion (Ouellette-Vezina, 2023). The provincial government promptly rejected the plan as unrealistic, effectively killing the project. In short, insulating the REM project from the broader transit governance system may have expedited its realization thus far, but it is unclear if this model is sustainable, and it has come at the cost of undermining the overall coordination of rapid transit development in the region.
Among Canada’s three largest cities, Vancouver has the strongest record in terms of systematic rapid transit construction. Underpinning this is the area’s long tradition of regional planning, which has produced a relatively broad and stable consensus about where rapid transit lines should be built (Horak, 2021). Vancouver’s first two rapid transit lines, the Expo and Millennium lines, were built and funded by the provincial government. Since the creation of TransLink in 1999, two more rapid lines have been built, largely on time and on budget, and a major extension to an existing line is now under construction.4
However, TransLink has not been the undisputed lead agency for these projects as might be expected. The main problem is that TransLink’s dedicated revenue streams are insufficient to fund such projects, and repeated attempts to increase them have run up against electoral considerations at the provincial level. In 2000, for example, the TransLink Mayors’ Council proposed a vehicle registration levy, but the provincial government rejected it ahead of an election (Horak, 2021, 254); in 2013 a new provincial government promised a referendum on any new transportation taxes in the Vancouver area, after which voters defeated a ten-year investment plan by the Mayors’ Council that would have been funded by a 0.5% sales tax increase (Taylor, 2022, 151). In the absence of sufficient revenues, TransLink has depended heavily on funding from other levels of government—especially the province—to realize rapid transit projects. The province, in turn, has insisted on having a hand in project governance, so in practice, rapid transit projects in Vancouver are significantly shaped by provincial interests.
4.7 Conclusions: Facing the Challenges of Transit Governance in Canada
The governance of public transit in Canada is highly decentralized and politicized. As a result, specific governance arrangements and transit system performance vary widely. Nonetheless, our review has identified some widely occurring challenges. Since transit operations tend to depend heavily on fare box revenues and municipal subsidies, their fiscal health is vulnerable to shifts in local politics and in ridership. This vulnerability is highlighted by the current fiscal crisis that many transit operators face in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has sparked discussion about the need to diversify sources of operating revenue.
Building rapid transit infrastructure, by contrast, depends heavily on intergovernmental grants. These grants are generally distributed on a project basis, rather than as formula-based transfers, and in a context where both vertical and horizontal coordination tends to be weakly institutionalized, this gives federal and provincial governments opportunities to insert short-term political considerations into their decisions about which projects to support. This politicization of intergovernmental grants also has another pernicious consequence: provincial and federal governments tend to find it more politically attractive to promise new transit lines, rather than allocating funds to maintain existing infrastructure; as a result, state-of-good-repair concerns are chronically underfunded, decreasing the quality of transit service (Davis, 2023).
Finally, with few exceptions, regional transit governance institutions in Canadian cities tend to be weak and unstable. In a context where provincial governments have full control over local affairs, these institutions are largely a product of provincial decision-making. The three cases that we have reviewed in this chapter suggest that provincial action in this regard is structured by a fundamental tension between the logics of policy and politics. From a policy perspective, provincial governments recognize the need for regional transit coordination, and they have made concerted efforts to establish regional transit authorities that can coordinate transit operations and plan and deliver infrastructure. But from a political perspective, provincial governments have been reluctant to give such regional authorities too much power and autonomy, since doing so would limit provincial opportunities to strategically intervene in transit governance. As a result, provincial approaches to regional transit governance—and indeed, to transit governance in general—have been inconsistent and unstable.
It is tempting to conclude that, given the fundamental challenges facing transit governance in Canada, policymakers have much to learn from practices in other countries. To some extent, this is no doubt true. However, as we have seen, the challenges facing transit governance in Canada are strongly influenced by underlying factors that are specific to the country, including low population densities, provincial dominance over local affairs, and low levels of horizontal and vertical coordination in the broader governance system. As Canadian urban centres continue to grow and environmental and social imperatives to encourage transit use intensify, new solutions to the challenges of transit governance must be grounded in a systematic understanding of the ways in which institutions, politics and policies at multiple levels of government have interacted over time to shape the current realities of transit governance in Canada.
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There is no comprehensive database of public transport systems in Canada, so this observation is based on the author’s scan of a variety of partial and non-authoritative lists.
The significant decrease in TransLink’s revenues in 2021 is related to this, since construction on major capital projects slowed significantly that year, so fewer provincial funds were transferred for capital purposes.
To be precise, some of these agencies run service just beyond their boundaries to facilitate transfer connections to local services in neighbouring municipalities.
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