Taxes and what they’re good for

It’s a neverending source of amusement to listen to local Liberal MLAs tie themselves in knots about taxation and infrastructure tolls. Shirley Bond, Mike Morris, Coralee Oakes and John Rustad love winding up their constituents about how unfair it is for area residents to be paying for the updated Port Mann bridge and now a new Pattullo bridge because they’ll rarely, if ever, use it.

Funny how they never articulate the opposite point.

If the NDP should have kept the toll introduced by the Liberals on the Port Mann bridge, maybe area residents should be paying a toll on the Highway 97 improvements between Prince George and Cache Creek, which the Liberals dubbed the Cariboo Connector.

Those two bridges in Greater Vancouver serve a majority of the driving residents of this province.

Whether they like it or not, the residents of Prince George, Fort St. John and Fort Nelson should help pay for it. In return, residents of Greater Vancouver are helping pay for highway improvements on a strip of road most of them will never use. Since there are many more of them than there are residents of Central and Northern B.C., most of the Cariboo Connector improvements are being paid for with tax dollars from the Coast.

A little appreciation of that fact is long overdue.

Oh, yes, but here comes the argument that the northern two-thirds of the province contributes far more to the provincial tax coffers through resource development than the rest. As a result, the logic goes, central and northern B.C. should get more.

Great argument... if you don’t believe in democracy.

Votes go to individual citizens, not to geographic areas of wealth. No one would ever endorse the idea of Jim Pattison receiving more votes in a provincial election because of his economic contributions to the B.C. economy, so why should a region and its residents receive the same treatment?

Area residents already receive preferential treatment at the ballot box.

A vote in Greater Vancouver is worth less than a vote in this region because the electoral districts in Greater Vancouver are all above the provincial average for population while all of the electoral districts in this region are below average.

In the case of Rustad’s Nechako Lakes district and Oakes’s Cariboo North district, they have more than 40 per cent less voters than the provincial average, according to the last B.C. Electoral Boundaries Commission report in 2015.

This inequity is allowed in B.C. to improve access between rural residents and their MLAs but it’s paid for, in money and voter equity, by Greater Vancouver citizens.

It’s tax time, so of course residents getting their T4s are seeing what’s coming off their cheques and being sent to Victoria and Ottawa. That fuels complainits about having to invest in infrastructure that, as individuals, we’ll never use.

Besides ignoring the fact that personal taxes are a minority contributor to all levels of government revenue, well behind business taxes and fees, it ignores the communal value of infrastructure. All local residents, whether they ride a city bus every day or have never boarded one in their life, will help pay for the three new buses in the Prince George fleet. To resent that expenditure requires the same amount of audacity as to deplore taxes going to a hospital a person has never been a patient in or a school a taxpayer has never studied at.

The B.C. Liberals – and many right-ofcentre political parties – have embraced the notion of lower taxes and higher user fees and infrastructure tolls. Former mayor Shari Green and many of her supporters also bought into that style of governance. The problem is that it requires more government employees to collect money from various sources in numerous streams. Fewer tax streams, centred around a consumption or sales tax along with a revenue or income tax, are not only easier to collect but also easier to understand.

Worse, however, this line of thinking introduces the notion that government work is simply a series of transactions with taxpayers, rather than supplying goods and services for the benefit of the entire population.

Drivers paying for new city buses, for example, benefit through reduced pollution per person, reduced wear and tear per person on city streets and reduced traffic.

And so it goes, from hospital and schools, to Greater Vancouver bridges across the Fraser River and a highway through the Central Interior.

Governments should always have to defend how they spend tax dollars but they shouldn’t have to defend investing in necessary community infrastructure. Fostering resentment in area residents towards government spending on Lower Mainland projects is simply a cynical and manipulative ploy to score easy votes.