Ottawa school bus drivers earn on average about $15 an hour. 1, and $15 an hour in 2019, is expected to exacerbate the problem. Now, the increase of the provincial minimum wage from $11.60 an hour to $14 an hour on Jan. "When what is truly important about this role is getting kids to school, being the first person they see, being the safety net for those kids because they know them, they know their families, they know their routes, and that seems to have gone to the wayside in trying to ensure that competitive procurement is in place," she said. "It creates an environment where it's about providing a service, providing a service for pay," said Kyriaco. "We've gone from a very open-book negotiated process to now a very confrontational and very secretive bidding process where I don't think we have improved anything overall and certainly not the delivery of our service to Ontario schoolchildren," Begg said. The contracts have been shorter, too - typically three to five years. The change pitted bus operators against other operators and led to the disappearance of many smaller companies who lost on contracts or couldn't afford to bid low enough to justify keeping the company going, said Begg. Whereas before school boards could negotiate longer deals directly with school bus operators, the introduction in 2009 of the province's Broader Public Service Procurement Directive forced transportation authorities to open bus contracts up to a competitive bidding process. As a result, the job mostly attracts people easing themselves into or out of the workforce, such as stay-at-home parents and retirees.īut changes to the way the province awards contracts to school bus operators a decade ago has accelerated the driver shortage, according to Mark Begg, president of the Ontario School Bus Association and the owner of Delaney Bus Lines, which provides school buses in communities east of Ottawa. In Hamilton, recruitment and training drivers is an issue.īus drivers work split shifts and have relatively greater responsibilities for the wages they earn. A chronic shortage in Toronto prompted an ombudsman report last year which pointed to systemic, administrative failures. The driver shortage isn't unique to Ottawa. The situation is manageable right now, said Kyriaco, but for an industry that values the safety that comes with familiarity - drivers who know the children on their bus and vice versa - it remains a problem. Students who bus to and from schools from Ottawa's English-language boards do so through one of 13 bus companies, who between them run some 700 routes a day, according to the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority, which oversees transportation for those school boards.īut this year there are 37 fewer permanent drivers than there are routes, a shortfall that had led to a reliance on part-time drivers and some double-shifts, according to OSTA's general manager and chief administrative officer, Vicky Kyriaco. School bus operators in Ottawa are facing a shortage of drivers, one they worry will get worse when the provincial minimum wage increases, making other jobs more attractive.
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