Critics and political foes will dissect and critique this week’s federal budget and tell us the good, the bad and the ugly for weeks to come.
But, there is one item that stands out as a curious contradiction: the government commitment for more money for public transit, yet they have eliminated the transit tax credit, which encourages transit ridership.
Investing in public transit is a good thing. Municipalities have been begging the federal government to support transit for decades.
But those new buses and trains won’t be much good if there is no ridership.
The transit tax credit may not seem like much to some bureaucrat in the Finance Department who does the number crunching, but for many Canadians, it was a key factor in making public transit affordable and attractive.
By the way, if transit ridership decreases, so does the amount of gas tax money that the feds dole out to cities, and that impacts all of us municipal taxpayers, whether we use public transit or not.
How can the government say that they’re investing in public transit, but make it less affordable at the same time?
It’s just a small item in this budget, but it could have a big impact down the road.
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