[Report] Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Public Transportation and Vulnerabilities in Rural and Remote Canada

Background

This knowledge synthesis (KS) project explored how remote and rural (RR) places face a complex array of social, political and economic obstacles in their access to sustainable, accessible, and appropriate transportation, and in exercising mobility rights. Growing vulnerability and inequality between these places contribute to growing vulnerabilities and inequalities among RR residents and the rest of Canada. The pattern of, and access to, public transportation in Canada, reflects the history of natural resource development and seldom considers the effects of the lack of transportation on health and welfare, human capabilities, education, climate change, and sustainable development. Mobility, however, shapes the conditions and lived experiences of gender, poverty, disabilities, and older-age; it either restricts or enables citizen participation. We take seriously the ways that vulnerability and transportation disadvantage are products of the structuring impacts of unequal mobility. For instance, insufficient or absent access to mobility–especially affordable public transportation–determines the ability of individuals and communities to achieve a sustainable livelihood, societal participation, personal and collective safety, and access to essential and non-essential services, resources, opportunities, and rights. Mobility- and transportation-linked possibilities and vulnerabilities are not experienced equally. These realities led us to adopt an intersectional approach that recognizes how individuals’ circumstances are shaped, constructed, and constrained by systems and structures over which they have little control. Given neoliberal restructuring, we paid close attention to how the systematic removal of public transportation alongside increasing, near-exclusive emphasis on automobility, is implicated in the production and exacerbation of vulnerability for RR persons, communities, and regions of Canada.

Authors

CINDY HANSON UNIVERSITY OF REGINA JOANN JAFFE UNIVERSITY OF REGINA EMMA VARLEY BRANDON UNIVERSITY JACOB ALHASSAN UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN MOMO TANAKA UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN MAEGAN KRAJEWSKI UNIVERSITY OF REGINA TAMIKANI JESSIE NKHATA UNIVERSITY OF REGINA BRENDA WASTASECOOT UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO JULIANNE ACKER-VERNEY MOUNT SAINT VINCENT UNIVERSITY