The Société de transport de Montréal (STM), which is still suffering from inflation and a significant drop in traffic compared to the pre-pandemic period, announced Friday afternoon that it would cut 8% of the payroll of its leadership, cutting three positions and modifying another.
“Faced with the new travel habits of its customers, the STM must rethink and develop its ways of doing things,” the organization said in a press release.
Last November, during the presentation of the STM’s budget for 2023, Marie-Claude Léonard, the company’s general manager, acknowledged that she was facing a difficult economic context. “We have a return of traffic slower than expected. It is therefore certain that there is immense pressure on our finances and on our donors, ”she said.
The STM then estimated that its losses would amount to $77.7 million in 2023. Observers feared that the organization would make service cuts during the year. In fact, at the beginning of January, the STM put an end to its commitment to respect a maximum waiting time of 10 minutes during peak hours on eight major bus lines.
Catherine Cadotte, the main press attaché for the mayor of Montreal, therefore maintains that the STM is once again making “significant budgetary efforts, with the aim of protecting its service offer, which no one wants to see diminished [davantage] “.
“The context in which we operate continues to challenge us and inspire us to change. […] It is crucial that we have a cross-functional structure to better support our employees in the delivery of our service,” said Ms. Léonard on Friday.
Justine Lord-Dufour, Corporate Advisor, Public Affairs at the STM, confirms by email that the “Customer Experience and Commercial Activities, Planning, Maintenance, Infrastructure and Procurement, and Engineering and Major Projects” management teams have been integrated under d ‘other directions. The organization is thus reduced from eight to five executive management teams.
“The impact is minor on the STM’s total payroll,” underlines Ms. Dufour.
The “concerned” opposition
Thursday, Together Montreal, the party forming the official opposition to the Montreal city council, published a press release saying it was “greatly concerned about the uncertainty that hangs over new cuts in the service offer” of the STM.
The party is calling for “the specific requests that the public carrier has sent to the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain and the Government of Quebec in anticipation of the 2023-2024 budget to be made public, as is the STM’s financial recovery plan” and that citizens be informed “of the cuts to come for 2023 in the event of the Quebec government’s refusal to increase funding for the STM”.
Ensemble Montréal indicated that a motion would be tabled to this effect at the city council on February 20.
Ms. Cadotte replies that “as long as the ARTM has not yet confirmed the demonstration of its contribution to the STM, the moment is badly chosen to mobilize the leaders of the STM, who are currently conducting priority negotiations. […] The ARTM’s financial contribution to the STM’s 2023 budget is still under discussion and will be decisive in presenting the state of the STM’s 2023 finances”.
Cuts to services, “that’s the last thing we want,” she said, adding that the Plante administration is also continuing its discussions with the Quebec government “for the benefit of the future of the STM.”
The press officer also maintains that “the opposition does not need a plenary to ask questions of the leaders of the STM. She can use the municipal council’s question period each month to ask questions directly to the chairman of the STM’s board of directors,” that is to say Éric Alan Caldwell, also a municipal councilor for Hochelaga.