'Don't get rid of the tunnel bus' labour minister urges ahead of Friday meeting
Steven MacKinnon says tunnel bus is ‘one of the legendary things about this city’
As the future of the Windsor-Detroit tunnel bus sits in limbo, federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon is urging Windsor city council to keep it going.
Earlier in February Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens vetoed a decision by city council to keep the tunnel bus.
Council will hold a special virtual meeting Friday morning where a request will be made for an override vote pertaining to the veto.
"I'm following this tunnel bus debate [and] I sure hope you don't get rid of the tunnel bus," MacKinnon told CBC News while on a visit to Windsor Thursday for meetings with workers and their representatives.
"That's one of the legendary things about this city."
Dilkens said he arrived at his decision based on U.S. President Donald Trump's planned tariffs.
"Why would we want to subsidize economic development in the United States when their President is assaulting our communities?" Dilkens said in a post on Facebook at the time. "We receive almost no benefit in return."
He wrote in his mayoral decision, published on the city's website, that the bus serves as an economic development engine for the City of Detroit while providing almost no economic benefit for Windsor.
And he said he was not prepared to continue funding it in light of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff threats against Canada.
Several city councillors have said they believe there could be an appetite to pursue an override of the mayoral veto. They would need a two-thirds majority to be successful.
Manny Sforza, the international vice-president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), says he believes the cancellation of the tunnel bus is because the cross-border nature of the service places Transit Windsor under federal legislation that requires it to offer all workers 10 paid sick days per year.
Dilkens did not mention the paid sick days in his veto decision, but he referred to them as a "dramatic" subsidy during a Jan. 13 council meeting.
'Entirely reasonable,' minister says
MacKinnon defended the government's decision to put in place 10 sick days for anyone in a federally regulated workplace.
"When I look at transit workers right across this country and what they're exposed to on a daily basis, to say nothing of what they were exposed to during the pandemic," he said, "I think having a minimum entitlement of 10 sick days is entirely reasonable."
With files from Heather Kitching and Katerina Georgieva