Montreal metro users witness the dilapidated state of the system firsthand on a daily basis. Québec solidaire is urging the CAQ government to address the situation by claiming the province’s share of the new Canada Transit Fund (CTF), which came into effect on April 1st.
“I am asking Premier Christine Fréchette to go and get the $5 billion, the money of Quebecers that is still sitting in Ottawa’s coffers for public transit. That money belongs to us. While all the provinces got their share, here, the CAQ government has dragged its feet and made us waste precious time,” lamented spokesperson Ruba Ghazal on Thursday, at a press conference in front of the De l’Église station, one of the five worst-performing stations in the network, located in the borough of Verdun.
As Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada expressed two weeks ago at the Montreal Climate Summit, Ms. Ghazal is “fed up with waiting for Quebec and Ottawa to agree on public transit investments.”
“While cities elsewhere in the world are developing and maintaining their subways, here we have to beg for money, we wait and wait, and then we get nowhere. This is not up to the standard of what we are and what public transportation should be in 2026. It’s not normal for our subway to fall into ruin.”
The QS spokesperson believes that “the metro is not just any transportation infrastructure; it’s the backbone of Montreal.” Sixty years after it opened, “this backbone is aging and needs radical treatment.”
For Ghazal, it is “out of the question” that the bill be passed on to taxpayers.
“What we are experiencing today is not a coincidence; it is the result of chronic underinvestment by the current government, but also by previous governments over the last 10 to 20 years. We want to avoid having people who use the metro forced to compensate for this underinvestment. It is not up to Montreal metro users to pay, because public transit is not a luxury, it is an essential need,” she said.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
