B.C.’s Transportation Minister says there’s no plan right now for the government to restore long-haul bus service through the North Thompson.

Claire Trevena was asked if the province plans to subsidize a bus route from Kamloops to the Alberta border, which hasn’t had a long-haul bus since Greyhound left last fall.

“Well we were obviously looking at the private sector initially. We wanted to make sure the private sector had the ability to bid on these routes, to go through the Passenger Transportation Board and just see that htere was that. We’ve also had request for proposals out there just looking at who would want to come in to the other routes, so we’re still working on that,” Trevena says.

“At the moment we haven’t had private operators coming forward to provide on that route,” she adds. “So it’s something we continue looking at right across the province, at where those gaps are and how we can best fill them.”

The province has a two-year cost-sharing agreement in place with the feds to subsidize BC Bus North in northern B.C., which serves some of Greyhound’s old routes.

The Kamloops-North Thompson MLA, Peter Milobar, has said the lack of long-haul bus service on that corridor needs to be made a priority by the NDP government.