A major transit gap was created when Greyhound Lines stopped providing intercity bus services in Central Canada in May. Greyhound had previously withdrawn from Western provinces in 2018 following a decrease in ridership. This time, the company cited financial pressure related to COVID-19 for ending service on the rest of its Canadian routes.

Greyhound’s exit illustrates the need for a publicly funded national transit system.

The federal government’s recently announced $15 billion in transport funding is a step in the right direction. However, such announcements do not necessarily lead to improvements in public transportation because provincial governments have the final decision.

In 2018, when the federal government provided funding to fill gaps created by Greyhound’s initial cuts, some provinces refused it.

Many communities in Canada currently lack intercity and regional transportation and are “under-served with intermittent, expensive and sometimes unsafe transportation options.” Federal, provincial and Indigenous governments therefore need to collaborate to develop an integrated national public transportation system that is safe, equitable, climate friendly and accessible — especially for rural, vulnerable and racialized communities.

An integrated national public transportation system could be designed to improve connectedness between communities and to needed services — including health care, education, financial services, government programs and food retail. It would promote environmental justice, health equity, human dignity and mobility rights.

Our research looks at how governments’ political choices influence these social determinants of health and health outcomes. We have focused on how budget cuts to public transportation worsen health outcomes. This Saskatchewan-based research shows that public transportation cuts can be especially detrimental to vulnerable groups such as people with disabilities, seniors and people with low incomes.

A new study called Here Today, Gone Tomorrow will look at vulnerabilities linked to the absence or presence of public transportation in rural and remote locations.

Why public transportation?

Transportation affects health because of its connections to service access and climate change.

Globally, 1.5 million people die from road transport — more than from HIV, malaria or tuberculosis. Canada had the fourth highest rate of traffic fatalities in 2009 among OECD countries. The most recent data shows that road traffic fatality in Canada continues to be higher (5.2 per 100,000 inhabitants) than the European Union average (4.9 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Investment in public transportation would reduce these deaths. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States found that while 76.6 per cent of traffic fatalities were people in private cars, only 0.1 per cent were bus occupants.

Public transportation can reduce poverty while ensuring health-care access. A 2019 study found that almost one million urban Canadians are at risk of “transportation poverty” because lack of reliable public transportation separates people from economic opportunities.

Our own research on the dismantling of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) revealed reduced health-care access and increased waste within the health system because hospitals had relied on the public bus network to transport equipment, blood samples and medicines. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the large-scale dismantling of public transportation options has left many communities stranded.

Public transportation is a future-facing, climate friendly option. Transportation accounts for 28 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions — higher than the global rate of 23 per cent. This contributes to the effects of global climate change, which disproportionately impact those who are poor. As a solution to the climate crisis, public transportation is far more feasible than other suggested approaches like electric cars.

Read more: The myth of electric cars: Why we also need to focus on buses and trains

Lack of public transit affects vulnerable people

Apart from the reasons above, a national public transportation system is necessary because its absence normalizes the oppression of already disadvantaged groups. In Western Canada, the tragedy of the highway of tears offers a cautionary tale.

Between 1969 and 2011 an estimated 40 women, mostly Indigenous, disappeared or were murdered on Highway 16 in northern British Columbia. The national inqury into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded that “lack of supportive infrastructure and transportation” has played a role in exposing Indigenous women to danger and violence.

Absence of public transportation also disproportionately affects people with disabilities. People with

Although a patchwork of private providers emerged after the STC closure, accidents were reported and services were not accessible to people with disabilities. It took a complaint by a former STC rider to the Canadian Transportation Association and two years of back-and-forth for a ruling to be made that private bus service providers must be accessible to all.

Such outcomes illustrate the need for an integrated national public transport system in Canada.

Re-imagining the way forward

Although national public transportation is being taken seriously in some parts of the world, public transportation is often targeted by austerity-driven government cutbacks. In Canada, deregulation made intercity transportation a provincial jurisdiction in 1987, which led to public transportation cuts.

Current concerns for climate justice, reduction of social inequalities, accessibility and mobility rights call for an integrated transportation system linking communities and services throughout Canada. Treating transportation as an essential service and mobility as a human right would go far in eliminating existing inequalities.

In re-imagining future solutions, Canada should pay special attention to the social dimensions of transportation, including its impact on women, the poor, people with disabilities, the elderly and Indigenous and racialized people.

Canada needs a national, publicly funded system integrated across provinces and informed by social, environmental, economic, health and accessibility concerns. Although countries like Estonia or Luxemburg differ from Canada in contexts such as size, their national public transportation networks can provide examples.

Such a radical vision may only be possible if transportation again becomes regulated in Canada.

Jacob Albin Korem Alhassan, Instructor, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, University of Saskatchewan; Cindy Hanson, Professor, Dept of Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, and Lori Hanson, Professor, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, University of Saskatchewan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Content warning: This piece contains distressing details about Indian Residential Schools

A macabre part of Canada’s hidden history made headlines last week after ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 First Nations children in a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Like 150,000 Indigenous children that were taken from their families and nations and placed in residential schools, the 215 bodies of children, some as young as three, located in Tk’emlúps were part of a larger colonial program to liquidate Indigenous nations of their histories, culture and foreclose on any future. To do this, Canada put into motion a system to “kill the Indian in the child.”

This system often killed the child.

While we currently have no evidence to determine the cause of death for each child, we know that they died a political death — these children were the disappeared.

Colonial population management projects

The chilling discovery in Tk’emlúps reminds us of the larger project of aggressive assimilation.

Indian Residential Schools were centres for state-directed violence against Indigenous nations, where the children — the heirs of Indigenous nations — were programmatically stripped of their Indianness.

Indigenous lives were broken down, sterilized of any trace of the gifts inherited from their parents and ancestors and re-packaged into Canadian bodies.

The brute nation-making scheme of the Canadian state looked to the existing infrastructure laid down by the prominent Christian churches. The churches were involved in population management almost from the moment of contact between European Crowns and Indigenous nations. The Catholic Church, which would go on to operate about 60 per cent of these schools, was a hawkish occupier.

Like branch plants in a vast production scheme, the state made good use of the extensive church network to co-ordinate the extraction of raw material—Indigenous children.

But the revelation of a mass disposal site for children — unrecorded and hidden — on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School tells us that the regulation of Indigenous life extended into death.

The politics of death and mourning

A fact many Indigenous people understand is that life’s benefits and burdens are shot through the colonial prism. As we go through life, we quickly learn that the weight of history’s finger is pressing firmly on the scale.

What is often overlooked is how that uneven distribution in life carries on through death.

Just as in life, how Indigenous death is mourned and remembered has been a matter of political control. The Canadian state, in partnership with the churches, has long unilaterally assumed sovereignty over Indigenous mortality and bereavement.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the atrocity at Tk’emlúps which has sharpened this for many Indigenous nations, as we see how the Catholic church not only denied these children the capacity to shape the means of and choose the ends of their life, but also they denied their communities control over their death.

In Tk’emlúps, the Catholic church decided that neither their lives nor their deaths were worthy of being known, remembered and commemorated.

One of the more appalling acts by the Catholic church in Tk’emlúps was how the children were deliberately forgotten; they were omitted from the official records that would verify their passing.

Documentation of death may seem clinical and lacking the human touch, but for some it has become crucial to contemporary remembrance. It is one way, of many culturally divergent methods, of confirming death and allowing the dead to have a social afterlife with the living. The painful void that lingers is what researcher Pauline Boss called ambiguous loss, “a loss that remains unclear because there is no death certificate or official verification of loss; there is no resolution, no closure.”

The memory of the person and their remains may strike us as two separate matters, but they are intimately connected in many cultures.

Not unlike Catholicism, the material body figures centrally amongst many Indigenous rites and ceremonies that cultivate social continuity with the dead. Matthew Engelke, who studies the anthropology of death, tells us that:

“(W)hat commemoration often involves is much more than remembering the dead. It requires a serious engagement with the things that ghosts and ancestors want: a proper burial, a pot of beer, a feast, money, a fitting grave-stone, the blood of a reindeer, the blood of kin.”

The truth about the disappeared

The truth about the atrocity at Tk’emlúps escaped examination during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the weeks before the TRC launched in 2008, the Catholic church was confronted with the allegations of a mass grave. Back then, the church denied any knowledge.

Until their remains were recently located, the Catholic church was content to leave 215 children as ‘disappeared.’

The disappeared — those that have been secretly disposed — produce a unique grieving. They leave families and communities in a state of suspended mourning, never sure whether their loved one is alive or dead, or where their remains have been left.

It is life abandoned to death with no chance of the living to intervene.

Now that they have been located, the surviving families, communities and Nations can begin to think about custodianship of the remains, mourning and memorialization. That much is up to them and every support and resource ought to be provided.

If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

Veldon Coburn, Assistant Professor, Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.