Driving over Confederation Bridge now costs less than one-third, in adjusted dollars, as much as when it opened in 1997.Ron Ward/The Canadian Press
The federal government has decided that Canadians nationwide, even those who never visit Prince Edward Island, should pay a little more to reduce the cost for those who drive over the bridge that links the province to the mainland.
Of course, they didn’t present it that way when they announced that the standard Confederation Bridge toll would drop at the start of this month from $50.25 to $20. The cost to take regional ferry services was also cut in half.
Instead, Prime Minister Mark Carney framed the decision as a way to break down internal trade barriers.
Those barriers should be reduced, as this space has argued repeatedly, but it strains credulity when everything governments wanted to do anyway gets attached to that goal.
The toll reduction is a request PEI has made for years. The province has long argued that the toll hurts its competitiveness and is costly for residents. They also note that the bridge is part of the Trans-Canada Highway, which is not otherwise tolled.
During the hotly contested election campaign in the spring, when a few Atlantic Canada seats might have made the difference, both the federal Liberals and the Conservatives promised lower tolls on the bridge. At the end of last month, Mr. Carney made good on the vow.
Driving over Confederation Bridge now costs less than one-third, in adjusted dollars, as much as when it opened in 1997. The toll was initially pegged at $35 and was to rise with inflation. In 2021, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau froze the toll rates.
However, the cost to maintain and operate the bridge didn’t magically freeze with the toll rates. And it won’t shrink now that Mr. Carney has acted to slash them. Instead, the federal subsidy to the private firm that operates the bridge will just get bigger, by tens of millions of dollars annually.
Making it cheaper to use the bridge will be popular among PEI drivers and road-tripping tourists to the province. But it is the wrong approach.
A core policy problem in Canada is that roads are ostensibly free to use. They aren’t really free, of course: the cost is just spread among drivers and non-drivers alike. But the perception that they are free creates a sense of unfairness when tolls are implemented in some places but not others.
Prince Edward Island can point, rightly, to untolled bridges in other jurisdictions. Drivers use the new Champlain Bridge in Montreal, which was built at a cost of more than $4-billion, for free. A replacement for the Pattullo Bridge in Metro Vancouver, set to open later this year at a cost of around $1.6-billion, will not be tolled.
A local politician has already floated the idea of waiving tolls for Canadian commercial traffic on the planned new bridge between Windsor and Detroit. And British Columbia Premier David Eby reacted to the PEI announcement by calling for more federal money for the ferries linking Vancouver Island with the mainland, which are themselves effectively extensions of the Trans-Canada.
There’s an argument to be made that user-pay policies around transportation in Canada are based more on political calculation than sound planning. Politicians’ first instinct is always to try to level the field by rolling them back.
Drivers should get a level playing field. But politicians should aim to achieve that instead by expanding the user-pay concept.
Although controversial in Canada, tolling remains the most fair approach and has an advantage that drivers would love: it’s one of the best ways to reduce congestion in big cities. When New York City implemented a charge to enter the busiest part of Manhattan, the list of benefits ranged from less traffic to quicker public transit buses to less honking.
It’s a simple concept that people will use more of something that is less expensive and less of something that is more expensive. Mr. Carney, an economist and former central banker, surely knows this.
Every successful toll program makes it easier to implement the next one. Conversely, every toll removed feeds the perception that Canadians won’t accept paying to drive, making it harder to apply the concept elsewhere.
Mr. Carney chose to make the idea of drivers paying their way a little bit more toxic under the guise of building a national economy. Bad policy dressed up as the crisis of the day is still bad policy.