Selling out public transit to Uber in Innisfil

If one is not fortunate enough to grow up with a car in Innisfil, Ontario, you’re virtually stranded in your town surrounded by vast swaths of farmland with no services within walking distance. This is how I grew up and the idea of public transportation in my small town has never been more than a pipe dream. 

The reality of growing up in rural Canada is a lack of public infrastructure, even in a place so close to our largest metropolis, just one hour north of Toronto. Innisfil is made up of a few moderately sized towns and several small hamlets, where the vast majority of people work outside of Innisfil and are required to drive to get anywhere.

For the working class in these towns, even getting groceries can be a massive ordeal, as paying for a taxi to the nearest supermarket can be as expensive as $50 both ways. Often, families like mine have to coordinate with neighbours for a ride. Until recently the only service or shop within walking distance of my family home was a convenience store with an attached LCBO, which became more of a gathering place for us rural Canadians than a local church. Needless to say, owning and maintaining a car is required for anyone living in these communities (approximately $1,400 in monthly expenses), and the problem of car dependency has long been a known issue to concerned locals. 

When I was a student mayor for a day during 2013, I remember hearing residents’ plea to the real mayor to consider a modest one-bus service to make inter-town travel affordable for the elderly and relatively poor population of Innisfil. The local petty bourgeois politicians never considered a bus system even remotely feasible, and though they heard out concerned residents, the question was tabled for another time.

In 2017, a private company that we are all familiar with now provided the solution. Instead of an expensive public transit system, Innisfil decided to make a first of its kind partnership with Uber. The city would take public funds to subsidise Uber rides, which Uber promised would thrust Innisfil into the future. 

This was big news back then and the deal remains in place to this day. If you look at Uber’s website advertising the partnership it portrays their intervention as a common sense, modern solution which is mutually beneficial. Uber’s website even gives price estimates for how much the township would have had to pay to operate those ridiculous bus systems, over $600,000 for the one-bus route I mentioned above. That’s operating costs, labour, and upfront capital investments for the much needed infrastructure of yesteryear. 

What Uber does not mention is the amount the town pays the company to subsidise these Uber trips. According to Innisfil Today, around $800,000 in 2022 and over $1.1 million in 2023 was given to this company which does not provide jobs, but unstable gig work; does not produce infrastructure; and failed to implement a system that actually provides more access to resources for the township. What was originally a $3 trip from anywhere to anywhere in the township, is now $6 and you must be picked up from a designated “stop” location. This system completely  flies in the face of their marketing that a bus system only works for residents within walking distance and now I have to walk to the Uber-stop with my Uber-ticket, just so the township can pay Uber for me to get a ride from my neighbour anyway!

 If the company were to suddenly lose profits in Innisfil, what is to stop them from just abandoning these small collections of towns? Many residents of Innisfil are completely dependent on Uber to get around their own town, and the mere idea of public transport is a dying one in all of Simcoe county. Nearby the city of Barrie has just recently in summer 2024 gutted its buses in favour of a ‘bus on demand’ system which is a clear grift to make public services worse as an excuse to get rid of them altogether. This partnership is nothing more than a highly propagandised privatisation of what should have been a public service, one that is mildly convenient on the one hand, but ludicrously expensive in exchange for nothing changing for the average person. 

An expanded public option would have meant an investment in infrastructure, real jobs, and have tangible positive effects on the health and well being of working people. In our modern world transit functions as the veins and arteries of a productive society, especially in a highly suburbanised country like Canada where everyone commutes. It only hurts the working class when a vital resource like that is monopolised by foreign corporations that are accountable only to their shareholders. Clearly, the local landlords and businessmen who make up our city councils do not have the interests of the “public” in mind when they auction off our supposedly “public” infrastructure. We, the working class, must demand more. We must fight collectively for a better country, one where working people have a say in the systems which most affect them, rather than letting the out-of-touch capitalist class dictate it for us. Under the current capitalist system our services can and will be sold off to the highest bidder. Only socialism can provide truly publicly funded and democratically controlled transportation that works for the people.