Governing Public Transit in Canada: A Primer

As Canada’s urban population continues to grow, increasing the capacity of urban transit systems while also ensuring their operational sustainability has never been more important. In recent years, new federal and provincial spending has led to a boom in the construction of rapid transit lines in Canada’s largest cities. At the same time, urban transit systems have experienced a crisis of operating revenues brought on by a sharp decrease in ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic. How well Canada’s transit systems will manage new infrastructure development and continued operating pressures in the coming years depends on governance – the way in which public transit is organized and run. Yet this subject has received little systematic attention from Canadian researchers. This primer aims to lay a foundation for future work, and to inform broader public discussion, by providing a high-level overview of transit governance in Canada. It begins by reviewing the role of public transit in Canada’s overall transportation system. It then discusses the decentralized and varied character of transit governance in Canada. Public transit is a municipal responsibility in most provinces, so Canada is home to not one, but a multitude of transit governance models. It is not feasible to discuss them all, so the primer focuses on the three largest provinces by population—Ontario, Québec, and British Columbia—and, within them, on the largest urban areas: Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver. It compares provincial approaches to transit governance, and notes that the interplay of distinct local transit needs and political pressures over time has produced different governance systems in each city. While all three cities have struggled to manage the fiscal impact of decreased ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of different transit governance models is particularly visible in the realm of infrastructure development. In Vancouver an integrated regional transportation authority, TransLink, has pursued a relatively orderly process of building new rapid transit lines in recent years. By contrast, in Toronto, where regional institutions are largely absent and multiple local and provincial actors are involved in transit governance, the development of new transit lines has been a highly politicized process plagued by chronic delays and policy reversals.