Horgan wants nothing to do with Metro’s mobility pricing
The release of the Mobility Pricing Independent Commission’s report on potential new road charges in Metro Vancouver was greeted by stone cold silence from the provincial government in Victoria. No ministers emerged to talk about the report late last week, and there wasn’t even a statement issued when asked.
The report outlined average charges of between $3 and
$8 a day for drivers to get around Metro Vancouver, up to $2,700 a year depending on the plan chosen, with low-income residents hit the hardest as a percentage of their income.
Those would be tough figures for an NDP government that picked up thousands of voters in Surrey and south of the Fraser River in the 2017 election by promising to scrap bridge tolls and give commuters a break.
You can almost imagine Premier John Horgan’s senior advisers flipping through the pages as a cold trickle of sweat grew on their brows, increasingly aware that every chart and graph presents higher and worse costs, until finally they hurl the 378-page volume across the room and refuse to ever pick it up again.
Even the legislature janitor would need gloves and tongs to handle this thing, it’s so politically toxic.
“I understand most of the mayors are taking a cautious approach to the contents of the report, I think I’ll follow suit,” Horgan told reporters on Friday in Vancouver.
“If it meets our objectives of affordability then we can proceed. My expectation at this point is that the mayors that commissioned the report are not enthusiastic about the contents. So I’ll wait to see how they want to proceed. It was their report.”
The NDP government will be careful not to dump on the report too much in public.
It was a creation of the Mayors’ Council, with whom Horgan is trying to repair relations after years of war under the previous Liberal government.
No doubt, the government’s vast army of spin doctors is working away to come up with the perfectly-crafted response that acknowledge the commission’s “good work” (read: thanks for nothing), its “interesting ideas” (read: we wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole), the “need for more study and consultation” (read: until the idea is so dead it’s not moving anymore), while acknowledging “we all agree steps have to be taken to improve Metro Vancouver congestion” (read: just not this, please god not this).
Scrapping the bridge tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges was a major votegetter for the NDP in 2017. It came with a promise to making housing more affordable, and to improve life affordability in general for Metro residents who are struggling to get by. The response was an orange wave of support for the NDP, and ultimately a minority government after 16 years in opposition.
But mobility pricing would wipe out the savings Horgan promised when he scrapped bridge tolls. It’s clear at least one option — “congestion point charges” — are just expanded bridge tolls under a different name, with the bulk of the checkpoints on water crossings.
For example, a person travelling from Surrey to Coquitlam and back paid $6.30 to cross the Port Mann Bridge twice under the old tolls. It would cost between $3.54 and $5.30 under congestion-point charges at peak time, and $5.20 to $7.48 under distance-based charging at peak.
It’s hard to imagine Horgan endorsing anything that would endanger the gains his party made on its “affordability” promises
in Metro Vancouver.
“My view is affordability is what we campaigned on and affordability is what I want to deliver for British Columbians,” Horgan said Friday, adding it is “one of the key tenets of our mandate.”
Unfortunately for advocates of mobility pricing, it’s hard to find much in the report that you could define as affordable. Most concerning, the proposal would eat up as much as eight per cent of the annual income of lowincome Metro residents, requiring mayors to dump as much as $250 million out of whatever revenue is achieved back into subsidy programs to help the region’s most vulnerable afford the higher fees.
The government’s first moves in power were to increase welfare, disability and minimum wage rates, so watching all of those gains be overwhelmed by one new transit tax would not be palatable for New Democrats.
Undoubtedly there are experts who will appeal to the Horgan government to enact mobility pricing because it is “good policy.”
Scrapping the bridge tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges was not “good policy” in the election, it was good politics. Both bridges were hemorrhaging money, and the decision resulted in $3.5 billion worth of debt being transferred onto the provincial books without any meaningful reduction in traffic congestion whatsoever.
The NDP has expended considerable effort to pursue the socalled good policy agenda fronted by the academic community in recent months. The speculation tax, widely praised by experts, spawned a mini tax revolt and angered municipalities. The new employer health tax, also widely praised by tax experts and left- wing advocacy groups, is set to boomerang in the form of higher property taxes from municipalities and has left Finance Minister Carole James scrambling to develop exemptions for charities, non-profits, school board and post-secondary institutions hit hard by extra costs.
The NDP doesn’t have an overabundance of political capital left to fritter away on other “good policy” ideas that read well on paper but translate awfully poorly into the real world. Mobility pricing falls squarely into that category.
It might help the NDP pick up a few dozen votes in the faculty association lounges of the province’s universities, but it would be in exchange for tens of thousands of real-life angry Lower Mainland voters who helped drive the NDP to office in 2017 and would pitchfork them out just as quickly.
Ultimately, the official line from Victoria is that mobility pricing is the mayors’ idea, and if they want to promote it before an Oct. 20 municipal election, and then weather the voter backlash entirely on their own, then the B.C. government won’t stop them.
But let’s not forget, the province still has a veto. The mayors would need the NDP to include the several provincially-owned bridges and highways in Metro Vancouver under any road pricing rules. And they’d likely need Victoria’s help with new regulatory or legislative approval as well. Both routes give the ultimate decision on whether mobility pricing will go ahead to premier Horgan and his cabinet.
When you look at it that way, the idea is already as good as dead.