Innovative B.C. starts the road-pricing revolution
British Columbia has long been a hotbed of democratic ferment and policy innovation. It is the province of referendum, recall and the country’s only truth in politics law. It led the nation in bringing in a broad-based carbon tax, using the revenues to slash income tax rates.
But the most interesting province in Canada may be about to outdo itself.
The Mayors’ Council, a group of Vancouver-area mayors, having lately settled on the means of financing their ambitious $7.5-billion transit plan — a half-a-percentage-point increase in the provincial sales tax, to be collected only within Metro Vancouver — will put the package to the region’s voters in a referendum next spring. As such, Lower Mainlanders will have it within their power to bring about a revolution in public policy — three of them, in fact.
Oddly, the transit plan itself, the usual hodgepodge of subways, light rail and bus routes, is not among them. Consider, rather, these three “firsts:”
1. It would be the first time a proposal to increase taxes was put directly to voters in Canada, via a referendum or plebiscite. Voters have been asked to pass judgment on many things in our history, from conscription to prohibition to daylight time, but never on tax increases. (While two provinces, Manitoba and Ontario, have legislation on their books requiring popular approval for any increase in taxes, subsequent governments evaded the restriction by passing bills to suspend it.) Yet in other countries, notably Switzerland and some American states, it is routine.
B.C. Liberals promised the referendum in the middle of last year’s provincial election campaign, as a way of punting on the mayors’ demands for more transit funding. To be sure, it has yet to be called. But while the government may wish to fiddle with the wording of the mayors’ proposed question, it would be hardpressed not to hold a vote — not after the GST harmonization debacle.
The mayors have never been terribly keen on the idea, believing such questions to be too complex to be resolved by a simple yes or no vote. But in the end, the issue is pretty simple: do you consent to pay more in taxes or don’t you? It seems only democratic to ask.
2. If passed, and if the province agreed to it (again, it is hard to imagine it refusing), it would also be the first municipal sales tax in Canadian history. The amount is modest, about $125 per household annually, and earmarked for the mayors’ transit plan. But the precedent would clear the way for a much-needed shift in the municipal tax base: away from property taxes, with their many inequities and perversities, in favour of sales or income taxes. The idea is already in the air — Winnipeg’s new mayor, Brian Bowman, is a proponent. This would move it from theory to reality.
Of course, governments being governments, the temptation will be to add these on top of existing taxes, rather than as a replacement for them. Hence the importance of the referendum precedent. Indeed, I might be inclined to vote against the current proposal, if it were just about trains and buses: transit would be better funded by passengers than taxpayers. But that is to ignore the most significant part of the plan, which is:
3. It would introduce the first* comprehensive system of road tolls — what the mayors call “mobility pricing” — in the world. And by comprehensive, I mean all cars, all roads, all the time, adjusted dynamically in response to traffic conditions and collected electronically via on-board GPS-based transponders.
Strictly speaking, the question before the voters is simply whether to raise the sales tax. But the broader impact would be to approve the plan it is intended to fund. And mobility pricing is an integral part of the plan. Along with the proposed tax increase and the referendum question, the mayors passed a companion resolution reaffirming their support for the idea, with a “Mobility Pricing Independent Commission” to oversee its planning and implementation “within five to eight years.”
Here again, however, the province would have to agree. Though it has struck its own review of tolling policy, it has yet to signal its intent. But the idea may have more political legs than one would suspect. Residents of the Lower Mainland have considerable experience with toll bridges, after all. The distortions and inequities that arise from tolling some bridges but not others have helped create a constituency for a more comprehensive approach, even as they have demonstrated the power of tolls: people will drive for miles to avoid them.But of course, if all roads were tolled, there would be no point. Instead, people would drive less, or at less busy times.
It is hard to overstate the impact of just this one change. At a stroke, it would effectively abolish congestion, by common consensus the worst of Canada’s urban blights. If it were accompanied by radical changes in municipal finance and a rewritten social contract between government and citizens, so much the better.
* OK, the first after Singapore, which already has the world’s most extensive system of toll roads and has announced plans to implement a GPS-based road-pricing scheme by 2020.