There is a lack of bus drivers in the Bonnyville-Cold Lake region. Check that. There is a lack of school bus drivers in the region.
There is clearly an abundance of bus drivers who, every morning around 5 a.m. and every evening around 6 p.m., pick up and drop off not students but workers heading to and from oilfield projects north of Cold Lake and Bonnyville.
That is not the problem. In fact, these worker-busing programs put on by companies in the region ought to be applauded for taking hundreds of drivers off the highways and replacing them with a few dozen buses.
The problem here is the lack of local school bus drivers. And with higher wages being paid to worker-bus drivers, on the surface there appears to be little incentive for drivers to choose students over workers, when deciding whom to drive.
“Since the beginning of the school year, we have had 15 instances where there were no bus drivers,” said Matt Richter, director of transportation with Northern Lights School Division, at the Feb. 5 board meeting. “Basically that is seven-plus school days across the division where a bus was totally shutdown.”
There are some that claim high wages paid in the oilfield hurt the low wage earner by pushing up the cost of living, and therefore high wages should be pared back.
Reducing wages, regardless of the sector, will have the harshest effect on the lowest earners, because in relative terms their wages will be the most severely cut back. As well, being a free market system, it would be very difficult politically and literally to pare back wages in the private sector. Furthermore, economists in a market-directed system would say the oilsands companies are simply “paying what the market will bear.”
Unfortunately though for school divisions, the market for bus drivers is not strong and will not support paying wages comparative to those in the oilsands. However, wages are not the only variable when attracting and retaining employees. There must be other options to attract certain members of the community to be bus drivers and retain them and those ought to be sought out and employed.
Communities in the region, along with school divisions and the provincial government, must come together with solutions to solve this dilemma before the students of the region are left without bus drivers and are forced to walk barefoot, in the snow and uphill both ways, just to get to school.
