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Eligible junior high and high school students across Halifax Regional Municipality will be able to ride public transit for free after the provincial government and municipality came to an agreement to continue its Student Transit Pass Program.
After months of uncertainty following the province’s decision to cut funding to the program, it was announced Wednesday — the day before the school year began — that students in grades 7 to 12 will once again receive the passes.
According to the municipality, the Halifax Regional Centre for Education will hand out transit passes for students attending five Halifax schools where public transit is “more practical than school buses.”
The province’s Department of Opportunities and Social Development (OSD) is funding passes for youth aged 13 to 18 who are connected to Employment Support and Income Assistance, which amounts to more than 1,700 students.
The municipality said it is funding transit passes for all remaining grades 7 through 12 students as well.
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“We’re excited that the program will now be expanding to include private schools as well as homeschooled students and (students at) public schools who were included in the program last year,” said Anthony Edmonds, Halifax Transit’s acting director of planning.
The province announced in February it was cutting its $1.2-million contribution to the program.
At the time, the municipality was uncertain whether it could shoulder the burden.
Education Minister Brendan Maguire told reporters Thursday it was never the province’s plan to cut the program entirely. He said $600,000 of that funding, for example, was redirected to OSD to provide passes to eligible youth connected to income assistance.
“What we were going to pay for, and always were going to pay for, is any access that those kids needed to (get to) school and our OSD clients. So I think it just became who’s responsible for what,” he said.
“On our end, we continue to provide what we’ve always provided: $600,000 will be coming from OSD for income assistance clients, and then the five high schools (…) where the students need school bus passes, we’ll provide them with $500,000. So we’re still providing the same amount of money.“
With the uncertainty around the future of the program, Coun. Kathryn Morse said it reveals a problem with how transit is funded and supported in Nova Scotia.
“Most other provinces provide predictable operational funding for transit systems. Here in Nova Scotia, we don’t have that from the province,” she said.
“So I think that’s something we need to work on in the future just to get that more continuity, more predictability into our transit programs.”
The province’s opposition leaders said they were glad to see the program funded, but called into question Maguire’s narrative.
“So they can call it whatever they want, but they are reinstating the thoughtless and cruel cut that they made in the spring,” said NDP Leader Claudia Chender.
Iain Rankin, the interim leader of the Liberal Party, called it a “strange communications exercise.”
“It’s just a strange communications exercise to not just admit that they were wrong and just say that they’re wrong and that they are bringing it back,” he said.
The student passes will be valid until Aug. 31, 2027 and will be delivered through Halifax Transit’s mobile fare payment app, HFXGO.
Physical passes will be available upon request.
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