When our new mayor first donned his mantle of leadership, I assumed he would soon have various city departments heads quaking in their books as he unearthed and exposed glaring inefficiencies and oversights.
Instead, two months later, I read about his Potemkin-style strategy to induce more seniors to ride our buses for free in order to squeeze more gas tax subsidies from our cash-strapped province.
Is this even legal? How, for example, is this any different from creating a “shadow” company to “launder” one’s ill-gotten gain or claiming one’s cat as a dependent? Is our premier so desperate to curry favour as to acquiesce in the proliferation of such a dodgy scheme?
Instead, why not simply lower the price of transit to increase ridership (as respondents to your Facebook page have indicated) and perhaps bus revenues as well?
Has anybody measured the price elasticity of demand for bus transportation? If not, perhaps we could hire a consultant from, say, Vanuatu (South Pacific) to investigate.
Peter Desotti
Sudbury