| Nov 12, 2009


They’ve slowed down a provincial plan to set up a competitive bidding process that they are convinced will put them out of business, although small school bus operators have not put a stop to it.

But they feel they now have three years to win that battle.

At the second Annual General Meeting of the Independent School Bus Operators Association (ISBOA) in Kingston on Monday night November 9, the association’s President Shawn Payne (photo right) said, “We are facing challenging times ahead, but we also have some exciting things happening as well”.

The ISBOA was formed one year ago with one goal in mind, to combat a plan that will change the way school bus routes are contracted out in Ontario.

The way the system has operated for 60 years has allowed for the growth of small-scale operators, who have been able to purchase one or two buses or more, with the assurance they would have a route to use those buses on. The fees paid for the service has been provincially regulated.

In line with new provincial procurement policies, a new tendering process has been brought to 25% of the routes in select school boards around the province on a pilot project basis.

In reviewing the results of those pilots, the Ministry of Education came to the following conclusions in a report called “Student Transportation Reforms – Progress and Next Steps: School boards were able to achieve value for money through

Updated terms and clauses in contracts to reflect current costs and requirements.

Some achieved modest cost savings in contract rate.

Standardized service and safety levels for their jurisdiction”

Shawn Payne, who operates Martin's Company based in Napanee, has a different analysis of the pilot projects. He says that what happened in most cases was that small operators were shut out, allowing three large international bus companies to take over more and more territory.

The ISBOA has been urging the Ontario government to look to the United States, where they cite numerous examples of the elimination of small companies in favour of the Big Three International student bus companies (Stock Transportation, First Student, and Student Transportation (US) – which operates Student Transportation Canada) after a similar process was undertaken.

“Once the local competition was gone, the price went up, so local businesses lost out while school boards ended up paying more,” said Shawn Payne.

As part of its lobbying efforts, the ISBOA has had two meetings with Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, with little success.

“We met with Minister Wynne in February and came out of that meeting quite discouraged,” said Shawn Payne.” It was clear she had made up her mind to proceed. When we met with her again in September, she said she was looking for suggestions, but again it was within the competitive procurement environment.”

A second wave of pilot projects, with some alterations to the process, has been announced by the ministry, with the projected date for all school boards now being set for 2013.

In addition to lobbying the government directly, much of the efforts of the ISBOA have been directed to the opposition benches at Queen's Park and at municipal governments. To that end, Chris Stockwell (photo right), Executive Director of ISBOA, who was himself a former Conservative cabinet minister under Mike Harris, told the AGM of his activities on their behalf with the official opposition at Queen's Park.

“When we had no luck with the minister, we decided we had to get more aggressive,” he said, “and we have clearly gotten their attention. We had to go to the opposition, and to the media, and we have done that. I know that the government is paying attention to us because whenever we do something, they know about it the next day.”

In September, the Conservative Party appointed Elizabeth Witmer as Critic for Education. Witmer, who was at one time Education Minister under Mike Harris, has made a commitment to ask tough questions of the government about the school bus procurement issue.

But Stockwell said the real battleground for this would be fought by the association membership. “The more active you can be locally will go along way towards helping us, because this will not be finalised before the election in 2011, and local candidates will want to win the election. Every signature on our petition, every motion by municipal governments, will have an effect,” he said.

The recent setbacks for the Liberal government are also good news for ISBOA, according to Stockwell. “They have lots of problems right now, with e-health, cabinet resignations and the harmonized sales tax coming up next July. Do they want to take on another unpopular initiative?” he asked.

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