LET’S START THIS REPONSE WITH A CLEAR WARNING: if you repeat this falsehood one more time (in any variant), I will quarantine you from any further discussion here in exactly the same way I did it with
Ssiguy and
LakeLocker!
Now to explain to you why you are wrong:
Contested claim (put forward by yourself, but please correct me if I paraphrased it wrong):
“At the time the Canadian was cut on its original CP route in January 1990, its subsidy need was
lower than the services offered by VIA over the CN route”
Counter-claim (put forward by myself):
“At the time the Canadian was cut on its original CP route in January 1990, its subsidy need was
higher than the services offered by VIA over the CN route”
Evidence brought forward in support of the contested claim:
Your argument is based on a table I’ve presented in various variants which indeed showed a lower subsidy need figure for a tri-weekly transcontinental service operated over the CP route (i.e. from Toronto via Thunder Bay and Calgary to Vancouver) than the same operated over the CN route (i.e. from Toronto via Hornepayne and Edmonton to Vancouver). However, this data was derived from VIA’s Annual Report 2018, which means that the data is unsuitable to support your claim for the following reasons:
- The data included in VIA’s Annual Report 2018 describes the financial situation of its network in the year 2018, i.e. almost 30 years after the “Canadian” travelled over its traditional CP route for the last time, which mean that it is impossible to extrapolate anything beyond order-of-magnitude estimates from these 2018 figures to the year 1990.
- For the same reason, the data I used only pertains the current route of the Canadian, which means that none of the data I have presented so far pertains the CP route.
- The only metric I’ve used to extrapolate the subsidy figure of today’s Canadian onto the pre-1990 Canadian’s CP route was train length, which means that the only reason why my figures suggested that the subsidy need might have been 2% lower over the CP route was that that route was 2% shorter, while it completely ignores any differences in the demand and costs specific to the two routes in question.
Therefore, the data you keep referring to is meaningless when trying to support your own claim, even though it provides some (limited) indication to my claim (i.e. the reason why I presented these figures) hat their likely was not a significant difference in the operating costs of both lines.
Evidence brought forward in support of my counter-claim:
Luckily, I stumbled over a document from October 1989, in which the federal government supports its decision for the cuts taking effect 3 months later by providing a detailed route-by-route overview with four key metrics (ridership, subsidy per passenger, cost-recovery rate and load factor):
By multiplying the Ridership with the per-passenger ridership, we can easily calculate the total subsidy for 1988, which was $50.1 million for the Super Continental, $12.4 million for Capreol-Winnipeg, $108.5 million for the Canadian and $2.0 million for the Sudbury-White River RDC run. Furthermore, we can consult the May 1988 VIA schedule to calculate the scheduled train mileage by taking the distance covered by each service and multiplying it first with the number of frequencies offered per direction, then with 2 (as there are 2 directions) and 365 (days in the year), before dividing the product by 7 (days per week). Dividing the annual subsidy by the train mileage results in a per-train-km subsidy of $27.35 for the Super-Continental, $26.34 for Capreol-Winnipeg, $29.31 for the Canadian and $11.44 for the Sudbury-White River RDC run:
Analysis
When looking at the total subsidy, operating the Canadian throughout 1988 was 74% more costly to the taxpayer ($108.5 vs. $62.4 million) than the two services operated over the CN route (i.e. the Super-Continental and the Capreol-Winnipeg service). Similarly, when looking at the subsidy per train-km (since the route of the Super-Continental needed to be extended from Winnipeg beyond Capreol to Toronto), operating the Canadian was more costly to the taxpayer ($29.31 vs. $27.35 vs. $26.45) than either service, the Super-Continental and the Capreol-Winnipeg service (or 8% costlier than both services on the CN route combined).
Conclusions
The evidence brought forward in support of the counter-claim don’t only support it (both in terms of absolute subsidy and relative subsidy per train-km), but also proves it beyond any reasonable doubt, given that it uses financial data which was timely (1988 was the year prior to when the decision to cut certain routes and keeping others was made and thus the most recent year available to assist this decision), relevant (it provides detailed information for every route in service) and dependable (since it was provided by the federal government, which is subject to intensive scrutiny by the political opposition, the Office of the Auditor General and investigative journalists).
Furthermore, the total subsidy paid for all four services combined amounts to $173.0 million in 1988, which equals $372.4 million in 2018 prices, thus more than six times the subsidy paid for the Canadian and Sudbury-White River service combined ($52.3 million) and even 20% more than VIA’s total operating subsidy in 2018 ($272.6 million). This confirms the long-term success of the 1990 cuts in terms of the main policy objective of containing the financial burden VIA’s operations places onto the taxpayer, regardless of whether we believe that this objective was appropriate or not. Therefore, the validity of your (contested) claim has been proven wrong beyond reasonable doubt and the validity of my counter-claim has been confirmed as a fact.
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Threaded Mode