OPTA Remarks to the Standing Committee on Heritage, Infrastructure and Cultural Policy

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Committee.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today on behalf of the Ontario Public Transportation Association, which represents transit systems large and small across the province. I am joined virtually today by Carla Stout, Vice Chair of OPTA and the General Manager of Niagara Region Transit.

OPTA supports the goals behind Bill 98 and the Fare Alignment and Seamless Transit Act. Fare inconsistency, cross-boundary wayfinding, and fragmented specialized services are real problems for riders, and they are worth solving. Our members want to be active partners in getting the implementation right.

I’d like to focus my time today on three points.

First, on scope.

The rider-experience problems this bill is designed to solve are real and concentrated in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. We would ask that the legislation say so explicitly – that the cross-boundary fare and service integration provisions apply to Toronto, Hamilton, Halton, Peel, York, and Durham, where One Fare is already in motion. Outside the GTHA, cost structures, ridership patterns, and operational realities are different enough that a single approach risks creating new problems while solving few. Scoping the bill clearly to the GTHA would clarify intent and reassure systems across the rest of Ontario that local authority over fares and service levels remains intact.

Second, on specialized transit.

Improving cross-border specialized trips is an important goal. But while a “one-seat” cross-boundary specialized trip sounds like a simple rider improvement, operationally it sits much closer to a private shuttle service than to public transit. These trips are long, highly subsidized, and resource-intensive. The 2015 Pan Am Games offer a useful case study: a unified booking platform was a genuine success, but the individual cross-jurisdictional trips it enabled cost as much as three hundred dollars each.

The risk we want to flag plainly is displacement. Specialized budgets are finite. If they have to absorb high-cost regional trips, the trips that get displaced are local ones – the medical appointments, the day programs, the regular community trips the system was built to serve. Regionalizing specialized transit could cost more, not less. OPTA members support better integration on the booking side. We would urge the Committee to be careful about mandating service models that, in practice, redirect specialized resources away from the people who depend on them every day.

Third, on collaboration.

OPTA members are genuinely optimistic that this next phase can repeat the collaborative spirit of the original One Fare rollout. That program worked because the Province sat down with agencies, identified the operational and revenue impacts, and provided the funding to make it work. There will always be unintended consequences in legislation of this scope, and the only way to surface and resolve them is through structured consultation with the agencies that deliver the service. We would ask that this Committee help ensure transit agencies are at the table before regulations are drafted, not after.

And finally, any provincial mandate must be matched with full, predictable, and sustainable funding, not unfunded obligations downloaded to local taxpayers. With those conditions in place, OPTA and its members are ready to be active, constructive partners in shaping regulations that deliver on the promise of this bill.

Thank you, and I’ll invite my colleague Carla Stout to add her experience.