COLUMN: Think Again – Free transit for youth was a half-baked promise

Free transit for young people was a key promise in the NDP government’s 2026 budget. The idea was to ensure that high school students wouldn’t have to pay to ride the bus to school or to work.

It sounded nice in theory. Who doesn’t want to give our hardworking young people a helping hand?

As always, however, the devil is in the details. Transit falls under municipal, rather than provincial, jurisdiction. This means that transit systems are run by cities, not by the province. Thus, the province doesn’t have direct control over bus fares.

Of course, the NDP wasn’t about to let the pesky matter of jurisdiction get in the way of a catchy headline. To get around this problem, the finance minister announced that his government would provide extra funding to cities with transit systems so that they could give free bus passes to young people. Seems simple enough.

Except the amount of funding from the province doesn’t cover the full amount of this program. This means that cities with transit systems must either make up the difference themselves or roll out a scaled back version of the NDP’s promise.

The City of Winnipeg chose the second option. After crunching the numbers, Winnipeg Transit concluded that the $10 million being provided by the province would only cover a portion of the total cost. Thus, Winnipeg youth will only receive free bus rides from September to March 2027.

In other words, once April 2027 rolls around, young people in Winnipeg will once again be paying for their own bus passes. This is what a half-baked government program looks like. The formula is simple—announce a program outside your jurisdiction, pick a dollar amount out of thin air, and then hand over that money to another level of government hoping it will cover the full cost of the program.

If the NDP wishes to provide free transit to young people on a year-round basis, it will have to spend more than the $10 million it initially budgeted for this program. This is how governments end up running structural deficits. Trying to initiate programs that don’t even fall under their jurisdiction is a surefire way to blow past budget targets.

This leads us to the obvious question: Why do governments keep getting themselves into this mess? The answer is that politicians like taking credit for something that looks like it helps a lot of people. A program like free transit for young people fits the bill for an NDP government that is long on grandiose promises but short on concrete achievements.

A far more sensible approach would be for each level of government to focus on its own area of jurisdiction. There are enough problems in areas that fall under provincial jurisdiction (schools and hospitals, for example) without trying to micromanage what happens in every municipality.

If the NDP wants to do something that would directly help a whole lot of Manitobans in a practical way, it needs to look no further than the PC Party’s pledge to raise the income tax threshold to $30,000. In one fell swoop, a two-income family earning $60,000 would save $3,000 per year. Not only could these parents easily afford bus passes for their teenage kids, but they could put away extra money for college tuition as well.

Sadly, Premier Wab Kinew won’t do something so simple because he thinks that he knows how to spend your money better than you do. Until we get a change of government, expect to see more half-baked plans that sound good in theory but fall apart in practice.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.