If students want to keep the U-Pass, they will be paying an extra $35 per semester.
Ottawa’s city council approved the fare hike along with the 2012 budget Nov. 30 at city hall. The U-Pass will now cost $180 per semester.
Students will have the opportunity to vote for or against the new price of the U-Pass in a February 2012 referendum, according to Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) vice-president (student issues) Chantle Beeso.
Students protested the fare increase by delivering 10,000 signed postcards with messages of disapproval to Mayor Jim Watson. Students in attendance also protested the elimination of the semester and the annual passes, which are sold to college and university students at a subsidized price.
Beeso and other CUSA representatives attended the council meeting, alongside student association representatives from the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College, La Cité collégiale, and Saint Paul University.
Ottawa students already pay too much for “poor service,” Beeso said.
“No discussion, no debate, over 46 bus routes cut, an overcrowded O-Train, and now a massive fee increase of over $70 per year and the proposal of the elimination of the semester and full-year student passes,” Beeso said. “Students in Ottawa already pay the highest transit fares in the country, and we aren’t going to pay any more.”
Representatives of each school’s student association talked about how cutting the semester pass would hurt. Students at Algonquin, La Cité, and Saint Paul aren’t included in the U-Pass program. The semester and full-year student bus passes have been eliminated, to boot.
“As far as they’re concerned, the U-Pass to them isn’t in existence because they don’t have one,” Beeso said. “So to threaten to take away the semester pass is literally penalizing students for absolutely no reason . . . You’re raising the price of the U-Pass by $70 and you have no interest in keeping the semester pass so what are you doing for students?”
City councillor and chair of the transit commission, Diane Deans, said students had agreed to raise the fares after the first two years of the originally proposed $145 pass.
“I know the students’ associations fought hard to keep the deeply discounted price of $145, but that wasn’t affordable for our taxpayers,” Deans said. “I thought it was unfortunate that students didn’t keep their word to city council and to our residents, and we did give them a deep discount for two years . . . We’ve tried to be fair. $180 dollars a semester is still a very good deal.”
City councillor and vice-chair of the transit commission, Keith Egli, said students should understand voting against the U-Pass would be problematic for the entire city.
“I have had numerous meetings with them, discussions with them, and I understand that they don’t agree with our methodology if you will,” Egli said. “There’s different things they would have put into the formula, but I don’t think they can dispute the math that we’ve used in the formula we used.”
This comes after an independent report conducted by PhD candidates hired by CUSA concluded OC Transpo had made “miscalculations” resulting in the fare hike.
Beeso said CUSA will continue their talks with city council before the U-Pass referendum in February 2012.
—with files from Erika Stark
