The metropolitan region's transit companies represent 90 per cent of a $2.5 billion deficit over five years.
QUEBEC — Quebec as a whole should not have to assume all of Montreal’s public transport deficits, Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault said Wednesday.
Guilbault was keen to lower expectations in the ongoing negotiations to absorb the shortfalls of public transport companies.
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According to calculations, these organizations will show a cumulative deficit of $2.5 billion in five years if nothing is done.
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Again on Wednesday morning, opposition parties and sustainable mobility organizations accused Guilbault of lacking ambition and condemning Quebecers to a reduction in services.
In the press scrum at the end of the afternoon cabinet meeting, Guilbault was terse. She noted that the forecast deficits of the metropolitan region’s transit companies represent 90 per cent of the missing $2.5 billion.
“I will make another offer, but I do not believe that it is up to the government of Quebec and the taxpayers of Quebec to pay for 100 per cent of a deficit of more than $2 billion in Greater Montreal,” she retorted.
“At some point, we must seek equity, efficiency, collaboration.”
She recently proposed to transport companies a package of almost $503 million, or around a fifth of the deficit expected over five years. She said she intends to submit a new proposal shortly.
At a morning news conference at the National Assembly, the executive director of Trajectoire Québec and spokesperson for the Transit Alliance, Sarah Doyon, described the offer currently on the table as “absolutely unacceptable and insufficient,” because the government does not provide for any improvement in the service offering for five years.
“The supply is so insufficient that it makes us fear massive service cuts,” she said. The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) would practically return to 2006 levels of service, “practically prehistoric,” she said, before the implementation of Quebec’s public transport policy.
“Minister Geneviève Guilbault is undertaking the largest operation to sabotage public transport in years,” said Parti Québécois transport critic Joël Arseneau.
“It’s unthinkable. The government lacks ambition, lacks imagination, lacks coherence.”
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