Every few years, Via Rail Canada’s budget is slashed and the debate over the future of our national rail passenger service begins anew.

So it is today. On June 27, 2012, Via president Marc Laliberté announced frequency reductions on several routes nationwide. He said this wasn’t related to the $41-million hit Via took under the Harper government’s across-the-board program funding reduction. Instead, he called it “modernization” and “rightsizing.” That’s like the captain of the Titanic saying, “There’s nothing to worry about, folks. We’re just stopping for ice.”

These cuts have wounded Via in seemingly small, but dangerous ways. As described in the Star on March 17, they have disrupted the lives of Canadians who depend on Via because they have no other form of public transportation. While Via cutbacks don’t wreak havoc on big cities with other travel options, they do in smaller communities without air and bus service.

As a result of this latest chop, the advocacy group, Transport Action, launched National Dream Renewed. It’s a series of town hall workshops designed to tell Canadians what Via’s problems are and what our government must do to fix them. Thirteen have been staged so far between Halifax, Sarnia and Thunder Bay. The Toronto session will be at Metro Hall on April 20.

In facilitating these workshops, I’ve heard heart-wrenching stories about the importance of the passenger trains to Canadians from all walks of life. Their anger has been palpable. Canadians are fed up with having public services ripped away, leaving every region I’ve visited feeling isolated and alienated. In a nation that was only a notion until the railways were built, the trains are both historically symbolic and contemporarily necessary.

The most basic question I’m asked at these meetings is why successive governments slash Via. The answer is complex.

One major reason for the perpetual crisis is the civil servants controlling Via, who have never approved of its mere existence. As a 1985 government memo said, bureaucrats “earn their points today by short-term cuts in government spending and the Via program has always been an inviting target.” The situation has only intensified since then.

At most, the bureaucrats — the principal sources of information and advice to the cabinet ministers who hold Via’s fate in their hands — grudgingly support passenger trains in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle. One of them, former deputy transport minister Nick Mulder, voiced that opinion in an online Star piece on March 20.

Mulder was part of this civil service that has always stridently opposed Via. He paints it as a subsidy burner because of its trains outside the central Canadian triangle. Never mind that these trains are the only public transportation in hundreds of towns across Canada.

Today, Mulder is a lobbyist for Rocky Mountaineer Railtours (RMR), a private firm operating summer-only trains from Vancouver to various mountain destinations. These include Jasper, which is also served by Via’s Toronto-Vancouver Canadian. From the day the company took over Via’s separate (and profitable) Rocky Mountains by Daylight tourist train under a deal forced on the Crown corporation by the Mulroney government, RMR has viewed the world-renowned Canadian as its mortal enemy.

While there’s nothing wrong with a private company running a high-end tourist train, some eyebrows might be raised by a staff briefing note for Minister of State for Transport Steven Fletcher’s meeting with RMR’s president on Dec. 1, 2011. The author commented on the taxpayer-funded services Via was ordered to provide RMR in its early years “at favourable rates at a value of $10 million.” The note adds that, without this assistance, “indications were that it would have failed.”

That issue aside, what is really missing from this debate is the recognition of the need for long-haul passenger trains that provide a vital year-round public service, not just a summer tourist service. It is why Amtrak operates 15 long-haul trains throughout the U.S., with more coming under the pro-rail policies of President Barack Obama.

Not only are Via’s trains outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle lifelines to many communities, they aren’t the subsidy guzzlers some want us to believe. Via lives on a basic operating subsidy that costs each taxpayer the equivalent of one takeout coffee monthly. That’s a small price for a service linking Canadians from the Atlantic to the Pacific to Hudson Bay.

Modern passenger trains are components of sustainable, publicly funded transportation systems in every other G8 nation. At the National Dream Renewed workshops, many participants have said they believe Canada will pay a steep price in economic, social and environmental competitiveness if we don’t similarly embrace what has become a global rail renaissance.

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The Harper government might ponder that as Via and our entire national transportation system lurch unsustainably towards the next federal election.