Something is going badly wrong with Nova Scotia’s transportation system.

The ferry from Maine to Yarmouth, N.S., a high-speed catamaran known as The Cat, has recently been cancelled. Another ferry from Maine to Yarmouth stopped in 2004. The ferry from Saint John, N.B., to Digby, N.S., is threatened.

The story is similar for land-based transport. Important rural bus routes may soon end. Intraprovincial air service has faded away. Regional passenger rail services disappeared 20 years ago. The economic and social effects of this developing infrastructure collapse are big and nasty.

Cancellation of The Cat is the latest piece of bad news. The ferry was operated by Bay Ferries, a private company, and depended on a multimillion-dollar annual subsidy from the Nova Scotia government. In December of last year, the government announced that the subsidy was finished. That was the end of that.

At its peak, The Cat brought considerably more than 100,000 tourists a year to Nova Scotia. Much of the tourism in the southwestern part of the province — particularly in Yarmouth, where the ferry docked — depended on this traffic. Restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts are already closing up. Gloom and doom prevails in Yarmouth and other tourist destinations on the South Shore.

The life of the Digby ferry, also run by Bay Ferries, hangs by a slender thread. This year is the last year of an aid package provided to the money-losing service by the Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and federal governments. Cancelling the Digby ferry would harm western Nova Scotia, particularly tourism but also the farming, fishing and trucking industries.

Meanwhile, Acadian Bus Lines has asked the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board, responsible for regulating commercial bus companies, for permission to reduce daily runs between Halifax and Sydney, and to discontinue services between Halifax and Digby, and Kentville and Digby. All these bus routes lose money, and it gets worse month by month. Says Acadian: “The status quo is simply not acceptable.”

Darrell Dexter’s NDP provincial government is showing remarkable insouciance about all of this. It points to a pending million-dollar consultant’s report, financed by the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, on transportation problems in southwestern New Brunswick and the Digby, Yarmouth and Shelburne areas of Nova Scotia.

The government says no action will be considered until that report has been received and studied. Nova Scotians affected by what’s already happening reply that in the meantime, at the very least, The Cat subsidy should have been left alone.

The government’s nonchalance is remarkable. Collapse of the transportation infrastructure deeply offends sound public policy. It’s economically damaging to a province already struggling. (Nova Scotia has among the highest provincial debts per capita, personal tax rates and unemployment rates, and one of the lowest personal incomes per capita.) This policy pushes travellers into cars and onto a weak and poorly maintained highway system, exactly contrary to current environmental thinking. It discourages tourism.

Perhaps most insidious of all, it accentuates the divide between rich and poor, between urban dwellers and those who live in rural areas. In Nova Scotia, this means the divide between the Halifax Regional Municipality and the rest of the province. Haligonians can get around just fine on public transport, but you have a problem if you want to go from Bridgewater to Mahone Bay and don’t have a car.

The heart of the problem seems to be that desirable transportation services cannot be run at a profit, if the idea of profit is narrowly conceived. The answer is obvious. These services should be provided by government directly. Otherwise, an important part of Nova Scotia’s social and economic fabric will go from bad to worse. IE