The saying goes that if you’re not a liberal in your 20s you don’t have a heart, but if you’re not a conservative in your 40s you don’t have a brain.

A ridiculous generalization, of course, but one repeated often, mostly by young liberals and middle-aged conservatives.

My journey through the political spectrum has taken a decidedly opposite route; in my 20s my limited worldview, naiveté and impressionability meant I approached social issues with a narrow focus, influenced greatly by my right-wing employer.

I saw issues like addictions, homelessness, crime and poverty as products solely of a person’s bad choices. On the fiscal side, I believed that those enjoying wealth and prosperity should not be burdened by extreme taxation in order to support folks with issues like I just mentioned, and that the free market should be left alone to be managed by consumers without the government picking winners and losers. Now on the latter I’m pretty much still in the same spot. In my humble opinion, society is no longer neatly divided into fiscal right and left wings.

One need look no further than the fact that longtime Saskatoon environmentalist Ann Coxworth, not someone most would consider on the right wing of political discourse, is arguing impassionedly for a carbon tax as a free-market mechanism to reduce pollution. Whether she’s right or wrong, the fact that she recognizes that strategy as superior to government interference is a marked departure from “normal” left-wing theory.

Having just entered my 40s (which I’m still struggling with), my perspective on social issues has undertaken a wild and sometimes tumultuous ride to a place far, far away from where it used to be.

Today, I see addiction as a far more complex beast, one that can and often does involve childhood trauma or abuse, genetics, mental illness, racism and much more.

I no longer see harm reduction as enabling addicts, because I understand that an addict hurting for a fix will find one with or without a clean needle. Now, I perceive needle exchanges and harm reduction as compassionate and an attempt by smart, educated people to mitigate the burden on our health care system caused by diseases like HIV.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that all four sets of my great-grandparents were settlers in Saskatchewan, and therefore played a role, consciously or not, in the cruel displacement of our province’s Indigenous peoples.

I can’t change that and still love them and am grateful for their sacrifices. But now I know that in addition to willingly acknowledging that familial history — because for a long time I deeply resented the negative connotation of the word “settler” — I have an obligation to tell the whole truth to my own children.

I’m 475 words into a column that was supposed to be about the closure of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) and why my opinion has evolved greatly on whether or not this was a good idea. Instead, I’ve probably nauseated you with what harsher critics would call my “virtue signalling,” which I’m honestly not trying to do.

As far back as I can remember, I viewed STC as a business, and a money-losing one at that: $20 million a year of taxpayers’ money sunk into a doomed venture that was contributing little more than a rural package delivery service, and the odd ride for a handful of people here and there. I supported its closure when it was announced in 2017.

After it closed, stories began to emerge of who was using the service — the key word there being “service” — and how its demise affected their quality of life, including access to health care and family, and their often already too-empty pocketbooks. It took me a while, but today I feel that viewing STC as a business, its value guided solely by profit, was inaccurate. Like health care and education, transporting people across our vast geographical land mass was a vital government service.

I defy you to find another province, state or country as big as Saskatchewan with so few people that does not have publicly-funded transit services both in its urban centres and between them, or rurally. When the Saskatchewan government announced it was shuttering STC, the headline on its news release read Government Ends STC Subsidy – Bus Company to Be Wound Down.

The document then goes on to make four more references to STC as “the company,” stating that only two of its routes were “profitable,” and therefore over “the next five years, STC is forecasted to require more than $85 million in subsidies to continue operating.”

“I didn’t use STC, why should I have to pay for it?” I hear you asking. Well, you do so already for any number of government services you don’t use, which is how STC should have been viewed as opposed to “the company.”

For example, how many times per year are you going to drive the $1.2-billion Regina Bypass? If you’re living in Saskatoon, or anywhere other than Regina, how does that bypass directly impact your quality of life?

It doesn’t, but you’re paying for it. Have you had to rely on Social Services to support yourself? If your answer is no, great, but you’re still paying for it.

This is not to suggest that even micro-cuts are not necessary to keep government spending in check. However, the proportional impact of each cut must be properly measured in advance, and that was not done in advance of the STC closure. Whether you consider it a business subsidy or funding a government service, keeping STC on the road and thereby Grandma or Kokum safely transported to her doctor’s appointment equalled 0.1 per cent of the Saskatchewan government’s annual spending.

It would have cost taxpayers like you and me about $6 per year. I’m not even going to calculate what the Regina Bypass is costing us. We have 161 million acres between our four borders. We celebrate Saskatchewan for its wide-open expanses and sprawling prairie landscapes. The provincial government should have been able to see its obligation to transport residents within them.

-Tammy Robert