After the COVID-19 pandemic, ridership on Toronto’s buses, streetcars and subways struggled to rebound.
But it surged back in nearby cities.
Brampton, Mississauga and parts of Waterloo Region were among the suburbs that rapidly recovered from COVID-19, setting records for the number of passengers and struggling with overcrowding.
Then, the federal government put a cap on the number of international students who could study in Ontario. The move appears to be directly linked to suddenly plummeting ridership in those cities, which are now recording millions fewer rides.
“In 2024, federal policy changes reduced immigration inflows and began to affect ridership,” the City of Brampton wrote in a statement to Global News. “Demand slowed late in the year and declines continued into Spring and Summer 2025, resulting in a revenue shortfall.”
Mississauga, for example, saw its student ridership drop 24 per cent last year and its total number of riders fall by 10 per cent.
“A 10 per cent drop in ridership does seem significant,” Mississauga’s Miway transit director Maureen Cosyn Heath acknowledged. “Certainly, the policy change is an impact on that.”
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In Waterloo, Grand River Transit provided four million fewer rides in 2025 than it had the year before.
“Decreases in ridership were mainly due to reductions in the local student population,” a recent report from the agency explained.
The cap on international students was brought in by the federal government in January 2024 and then tightened. It’s been blamed by the Ontario government for financial struggles at provincial colleges as even overseas students who can get visas begin to stay away.
Cosyn Heath said the long-term impacts of the policy would mean Mississauga has to change how it plans its transit system, perhaps dropping or reducing its routes serving campuses or student housing.
“We’re aware that the changes on international students are going to have a permanent impact on us in the longer term,” she said. “So we revise our ridership projections, and then we pivot and shift to figuring out what new markets exist that we need to serve better.”
Brampton, too, said it would be “aligning service delivery with demand and long-term sustainability.”
Despite the short-term hit to transit ridership around Toronto, one transit expert believes it’s a bump in the road rather than an existential threat.
“Brampton was the transit success story of North America long before the international boom,” Jonathan English, principal at Infrastory Insights, told Global News.
“They experienced a 250 per cent ridership bump before international students arrived. Is it a significant drop? For sure. And will that have financial consequences? Definitely. But I think we need to keep it in perspective.”
In Mississauga, the transit agency is taking a pause to assess the impacts, but not scaling back. After increasing ridership hours, MiWay will freeze them for 2026 as it works out how to address a 10 per cent drop in travellers.
“You’re not going to see service cuts unilaterally across the system as a result of one pocket of our ridership,” Cosyn Heath said.
English said that’s the right approach, urging cities to ensure service improves to attract new riders who aren’t as reliant on transit as students might be.
“It’s hard to change routes before ridership data comes in. Now the ridership data has come in and there is an opportunity for the systems to respond — and they need to respond,” he said.
“Are some routes going to permanently or, for the foreseeable future, have less ridership? Absolutely… but overall the cities continue to grow, people continue to travel to work, to play, to school, so the key goal has to be here ot make sure we maintain a basic quality service level.”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.