A funding boost for Transit Windsor.
Windsor-Tecumseh MPP Andrew Dowie held a news conference Friday morning at Windsor City Hall with Mayor Drew Dilkens to announce a provincial investment of $4.4 million ($4,462,436) to the city’s bus service.
The money is from the 2025-26 Gas Tax program and will support Transit Windsor’s operating budget.
Mayor Drew Dilkens says the funding plays a critical role in supporting daily transit operations and maintaining service levels at Transit Windsor.
He says without the provincial funding, the city would have to find $4.4 million from the tax base for transit services.
“This actually fills about half of that hole, which is really important for us because we’re also investing in transit,” he says. “We put $5.4 million more on the capital side on transit, buying new buses and some investments, which you see happening in the city, like the East End Transit Terminal being built.”
Dilkens says the city does not want to cut back transit services.
“We want to continue to deliver it,” says Dilkens. “We recognize that this challenging time we’re seeing with respect to international students and that number dropping off a cliff is probably just a moment in time, and so we’re hoping that sort of normalizes and stabilizes whether soon.”
He says the city appreciates the $4.4 million from the province.
“We hope to grow that over time as we get more students coming back to the college and university and as we get more people living in the community comfortable using Transit Windsor as well as we continue to enhance the services here,” he says. “I think we’ll get back to a better time sooner rather than later.”
Transit Windsor received the same funding amount from the 2024-25 Gas Tax program.
In April, the city announced it was going to launch an early review of the Transit Windsor master plan after posting an almost $8 million deficit in 2025.
According to a release from Dowie’s office, nearly eight million passenger trips were delivered by Transit Windsor in 2025, supported by more than 300 employees and a fully accessible fleet of 117 buses.
Last month, Tecumseh received $176,470 from the program to assist with Tecumseh Transit, the same amount it received the previous year.
The Gas Tax program can be used for local public transit initiatives such as expanding service hours, increasing routes, purchasing new vehicles, and improving accessibility to increase transit ridership.
