Lukaszuk, McIver embrace LRT plans
But McIver also stands up for funding of municipalities
When you dig through the archives of newspaper stories on LRT funding, it’s hard to find quotes where provincial leaders wax poetic about the benefits of mass transit and the need for the province to do its share.
Even when the province provided substantial funds, as Peter Lougheed’s government started to do in 1974, there was little in the way of Lougheed or others saying adoring things about mass transit. That’s no longer case. And this is how the world changes.
What was once only the dream and the obsession of big city progressives, what was once discounted and forgotten during the carobsessed Klein era, is now the new normal.
It took provincial leaders decades to get there, but all three Tory candidates seeking to replace Alison Redford as premier are firmly on board with mass transit as a priority.
I’ll focus on front-runner Jim Prentice’s take on LRT and other municipal issues on Friday, while looking today at challengers Thomas Lukaszuk and Ric McIver.
Lukaszuk and McIver make it clear that if Edmonton and Calgary prioritize LRT, so will they.
“The LRT is important to both big cities,” McIver says.
“Edmonton has a pretty aggressive plan to expand their LRT, which sounds great. The city gets to decide what their priority is. I can only assure them that as premier I’ll be listening.”
And Lukaszuk: “Because it’s a priority, particularly from Edmonton and Calgary, I will make it my priority. If we are to grow our cities as cities you want to live in, but also as economic powerhouses, the quick movement, rapid movement of people is fundamental.”
The positive rhetoric about LRT fits in with Lukaszuk’s theme that Alberta is lacking in some basic cultural and recreational amenities, and he’d like to help change that.
On a recent recruiting trip, where Alberta was competing with other jurisdictions around the world for United Kingdom doctors, Lukaszuk says none of the doctors was fixated on salary, but many asked about Alberta’s sports, arts and recreational facilities and about the strength of our public schools.
“That is the new currency for attracting and retaining people,” he says.
His motto for Alberta? “I am not into building a work camp. I am into building a province in which people want to live and stay.”
And McIver? He stands up for more of an old-school, common-sense Alberta. He would have fit right in on any Klein cabinet.
His conservative bent comes out when I ask him about the issue of industrial taxes. Alberta’s county governments are getting rich off of pipeline and oil plant taxes. The counties rake in more than 90 per cent of a pie that has grown to $1.6 billion per year from $464 million in 1996.
It’s a windfall for the counties, but Alberta’s hamlets, towns and cities are surrounded by pipelines and plants, yet don’t have many inside their tight borders, so they end up as the tax-starved poor relations.
Both McIver and Lukaszuk say they’ll try to figure out incentives to get the counties and towns to co-operate more.
At the same time, McIver questions the town and city politicians who feel their jurisdictions deserve some of the county revenue.
“It’s pretty tempting I’m sure for different municipalities in the province to look at their neighbours and eye their neighbours’ tax revenue and consider it ought to to be shared.”
McIver comes across as a staunch conservative, a defender of the status quo. On industrial taxes, he’s under-estimating the problems around the inequality caused by rich counties and poor towns, but I can see how a centre-right party such as the Progressive Conservatives benefits from his cautious viewpoint.
McIver says that more provincial infrastructure funds can only flow to the cities and towns if the province’s finances improve.
“Whether you’re the federal government, the provincial government, or the municipal government, the pressure and needs for infrastructure are crushing. We’re all under extreme pressure. I think we all need to do what we can, and we need to respect the pressure the other order of government is under and keep the lines of communication open and work together as best we can.”
That sounds like a sensible position.
On municipal issues, McIver fixates on what’s traditional and reasonable, while Lukaszuk is more attuned to making progress, such as on LRT.
The PCs have taken a welldeserved beating in the last year, but it’s this mix of conservatism and progressivism that has kept them in power for decades. It can make for a potent combination.