What Cost Cutbacks?

Yesterday as I was driving home from work I heard a news blurb that I knew would get my mother’s dander up.  Since the deregulation of transportation the Greyhound service has been cutting their bus routes and the latest cuts have now affected most of the small towns in our vicinity, including ours.  For years my mother has been complaining about the lack of services in small towns but this has now been the last straw.  What are people to do who have no driver’s license if they want to go to another town or city?  Hitch a ride?  Beg a neighbour for a ride?  Some ten years or so ago they took all the rail lines out of the ground that used to connect the grain elevators with the railroad.  More than half of the grain elevators have disappeared, or at least they have been shut down.  Last week the deregulation of the Wheat Board ended their monopoly.  Our province has been threatening to close down most of the small town hospitals which would mean that everyone south of Calgary would have to be taken by ambulance to Calgary for any life saving treatment.  The distance between Calgary and Lethbridge is some 216 km north and south; then there is the expanse east to west.  How many people would succumb before they reached a hospital?

       So the question is, when are cutbacks appropriate and when should cost be overridden by the need of the population.  The fact is that the rural communities pay their fair share of taxes and yet they scarcely reap the benefits of their tax dollars in relation to their city cousins.  I have heard city people speak resentfully of those commuting from outside the city who use the city transit system.  In particular, should they park their cars on the transit parking lots, woe to them who go there.  And yet if they bothered to read the placards on the trains, they were sponsored by Federal, Provincial and Municipal tax dollars.  That’s correct, we country folk helped pay for those trains so we have a right to ride on them also.  These same city slickers have no problem venturing out to “our” country parks for their camp outs, nor do they have any problem shooting “our” birds and deer in hunting season.  That’s my wheat those deer or chomping on all summer, sweetheart.  Not to mention my trees.

       The main question though is can anyone tell me when deregulation has actually worked out to cost less for the average Joe?