Tax vote results finally here
Vancouver plebiscite about transit funding
Months ago, if memory serves, eligible voters in Metro Vancouver received in their mailboxes special ballots from Elections B.C. Buried inside a series of forms and envelopes was a slip asking recipients if they wanted a special 0.5 per cent increase applied to B.C.’s seven per cent sales tax to help fund the region’s public transit authority, called TransLink.
For the first time in Canada, apparently, people were asked directly to decide on a proposed tax increase. It was revolutionary, slowly.
The slips were mailed in March, when winter was just ending. Ballots were to be completed and mailed back to Elections B.C. or dropped off at various ballot-collection stations by the end of May.
It’s now well into summer. School is out and bus queues have all but vanished. People have beaches and blueberries on the brain, and as for that
The yes side spent $5.8M in public funds, the no side $40,000
transit plebiscite ... what plebiscite?
Oh, wait: that one. Results will be announced Thursday morning. Metro Vancouver voters will finally learn whether they decided to have TransLink collect from them an estimated $250 million in new tax revenue, annually, for a decade. All the extra loot, they’ve been told, would go into a super-special, hands-off account meant to fund a host of urgently needed transit improvements.
The funds would not be used to pay down TransLink’s worrisome $5-billion debt, or to help meet its $1.5 billion annual operating costs, which it can barely cover these days.
Questionable spending decisions, workplace issues, service interruptions and interminable delays have dogged the corporation and eroded the public’s confidence, especially this year. Other, flashier improvements are described as must-haves. These include a $3-billion subway line in Vancouver’s west side, stopping well short of the University of British Columbia campus, the very place the line is meant to serve; light-rail transit in Surrey, which the mayor has said will be built regardless of the plebiscite’s outcome; and more buses and bike lanes, everywhere.
We’re told — by TransLink boosters, special interests and vested parties — that without the 0.5 per cent sales tax increase, to be applied in Metro Vancouver only, people will suffer. Not just financially, but physically. Traffic fatalities will increase. Obesity and asthma rates will soar. Sickness will come over us.
We’ve been warned. How about informed? TransLink advocates had little to say about their scheme’s massive funding shortfall: Even with $250 million in new tax revenue collected every year (in addition to the hundreds of millions already raised for TransLink in user fees, through property taxes, regional gas taxes and so on), the Crown corporation would still need to source another $5 billion over 10 years to meet its $7.5-billion improvement plan.
Where would that come from? The provincial and federal governments have not committed to the plan. A real concern. But only fools would vote against transit improvements, some screamed. No side folks were likened to knuckle-dragging, mini-van-driving yokels. Rubbing dirt into their eyes, the region’s mayors council spent $5.8 million in public funds to promote the TransLink plan and peddle its version of a transit utopia — and nightmare scenarios if the skeptics prevailed.
Led by Jordan Bateman, B.C director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the No forces stretched some noses too. And they spent $40,000.
This was an obscenely unbalanced campaign. For all that, opinion polls had the two sides almost even, just before the voting process began. Eons ago, it seems.
If the No side prevails Thursday, nothing much changes. TransLink might be forced to find efficiencies and live within its means. If the Yes side wins, taxes go up: welcome to Vancouver, where revolutions happen. Precisely when, no one is certain. For what, we’re still not really sure.