Every day, 7,000 students are affected by service disruptions in the school transportation service, which is suffering from a growing labor shortage. A situation that leads the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) to urge school service centers (CSS) to hire their own bus drivers instead of relying on the private sector.
During school days, an average of 170 school buses have been paralyzed daily over the past two years in Quebec. This represents just under 7,000 students affected daily by these service interruptions, according to a new IRIS study published Wednesday. The analysis, which is about forty pages long, is based on the results of a series of access to information requests sent to the province’s 61 CSSs and 11 school boards.
This means that just over 1% of the province’s 580,000 students who benefit from this service are unable to get on a bus to class every day. “A worrying situation,” according to researcher Colin Pratte, who conducted the study. Especially since these service disruptions were “exceptional and rare” just a few years ago, he notes. They then became “systematic” starting in 2022, on the sidelines of the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted several drivers “to leave the profession,” notes Mr. Pratte.
Older drivers
At the heart of these service disruptions is the shortage of bus drivers, which has been fueled in recent years by difficult working conditions and the aging of these workers. The percentage of school bus drivers who are 55 and older has increased from 54% in 2014 to 68.2% in 2023, the study shows.
“We are seeing an aging workforce, which is not unrelated to the fact that the industry is struggling to attract and retain staff,” emphasizes Colin Pratte. Meanwhile, private carriers “claim that they do not have sufficient financial room for maneuver” to improve the working conditions of their employees, he emphasizes.
In an email to Dutythe office of the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, recalls having allocated “significant resources to school transportation”, to which it is allocating this year a sum close to a billion dollars. “We want every dollar to be used in the best possible way to offer a stable and reliable service” and thus avoid “service interruptions”, assures the office.
However, during this time, data from the Ministry of Finance shows an average pre-tax profit rate of 13.5% for school transportation companies in Quebec for the period from 2012 to 2019. This is significantly higher than the net profits of 5.8% recorded by companies in non-financial sectors in Canada from 2014 to 2019.
Colin Pratte thus proposes the inclusion of a minimum remuneration in the contracts that CSS concludes with private transporters, which could contribute to curbing “the shortage of personnel” by relying on the surpluses available to these companies.
Luc Lafrance, President and CEO of the Fédération des transporteurs par autobus, states that, with the exception of the big names in the school transportation industry, the majority of companies that provide this service “have much lower revenues” and a much more limited financial margin than that mentioned in the study. He also notes that recruiting drivers is easier this year, thanks in particular to the salary bonuses put in place by Quebec to make this profession more attractive.
Relying on public transport
IRIS also believes that Quebec would benefit from expanding the scope of the pilot projects launched last fall in some CSSs, which were able to hire drivers and acquire school buses. Ten such initiatives are underway in the province, thanks to an investment of $2.7 million from Quebec.
This pilot project has also enabled the CSS des Affluents to reduce service disruptions in its school transport offering by 95%, noted IRIS.
“Everything indicates that a wider distribution of public transport would allow us to improve the quality of services, simply because the public sector is clearly better able to attract and retain staff than the private sector is able to do,” explains Colin Pratte. “This could be an interesting avenue to avoid the increase in public budget envelopes allocated to school transport being reaped as profits for private transporters.”