Greyhound

Back in the all-things-are-possible days of my youth, I must have done the cross-Canada trip a dozen times or more.

Sometimes I drove. Me and Paul Newman did a Guelph to Calgary run in the dead of winter in a Mercury Grand Marquis in just under 28 hours once. That remains a personal best for that particular route. The achievement is doubly noteworthy because the wipers on that old boat didn’t work, and it was snowing constantly, so you had to maintain a good turn of speed to keep the snow off the windshield.

Other times I thumbed.

When I was flush, which was not very often, I might take a plane.

From time to time I’d find myself on a Greyhound bus. That was the modality of last resort, and taking the bus usually didn’t cross your mind till about the third day of trying to hitch a ride out of some shithole northern town where the locals were more inclined to give you the finger rather than give you a lift.

One thing you figured out pretty quick was that the Greyhound was a great place to get to know your First Nations brothers and sisters. There was a general aversion to socializing with your Indian co-passengers, but I found that if they saw you as a hard-luck kinda person they could be quite congenial.

Greyhound has officially washed its hands of the hard-luck folks who have to take the bus. As much as the general public may not give a shit, those buses were a lifeline for a lot of First Nations communities.

This is a great opportunity for some of those First Nations millionaires to step up to the plate. Any sovereign nation has a vested interest in the transport needs of its citizens. If the “market” can’t meet those needs, and if the settler government in Ottawa won’t meet those needs, maybe its time for First Nations to provide the solution to this problem.

That’s what a sovereign nation would do.