BIG TRANSIT? ELECT PRO-TRANSIT PEOPLE
Transit types are desolate over the failure of this attempt in B.C. to raise sales taxes to pay for new rail and bus lines throughout greater Vancouver. Here’s the lesson: If you want a big public project, elect a government with the nerve to see it through.
The Vancouver plebiscite was a months-long mail-in affair asking people in and around Vancouver whether they’d pay an extra half-point in sales tax to fund $7.5 billion worth of transit projects. The idea was backed by nearly all the local mayors, who are maddened that the provincial government won’t help pay for things they think are critical.
Nope, said the people, in results announced this week. They rejected the proposal 62 per cent to 38. Even in granola-strewn, transit-dependent Vancouver proper, it failed 51-49. Voters in only three jurisdictions agreed with the proposition: two tiny villages on the fringes of the city and a district dominated by the University of British Columbia. The three of them total about 4,400 votes among the 757,000 cast.
This kind of direct democracy, seeking yes-or-no votes on issues, isn’t how we Canadians ordinarily govern ourselves. Possibly because we’re a skeptical, cautious people who say no to things by default. The way it’s supposed to work, we elect people who see the world’s problems more or less the way we do and whose judgment we more or less trust to deal with them. If, after a few years, we think they’ve done a decent job, we re-elect them.
The recent history of such direct votes in Canada is a history of rejections. When Ontarians voted on electoral reform, we decided against it. British Columbians did, too, and against harmonizing their provincial and federal sales taxes. Quebecers have voted against separation twice. Canada as a whole voted against the Charlottetown accord on constitutional reform.
You’d almost get to thinking that a good way to kill an idea is to put it to a popular vote. Especially if it’s a complicated idea that’s easily caricatured.
TransLink, the Vancouver area’s transit agency, is not popular, and the caricature there was that residents were being asked to give a bloated, inefficient government body a load more money to spend on God knows what, forever. Ginning up such a campaign in nearly any city with a large transit system wouldn’t be that hard. Who loves OC Transpo or the TTC? Who thinks Montreal’s STM is a model of efficiency?
It might seem like an oddity that Vancouverites were asked to vote on funding transit projects at all. British Columbians didn’t vote on whether to spend $600 million on the Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, or $130 million in improvements to the Kicking Horse Pass that links B.C. and Alberta.
The thing is, Greater Vancouver has a bunch of mayors who think their cities and towns need more transit and a provincial government, led by Christy Clark, that thinks it shouldn’t pay for it. The popular vote was a way to break the logjam, which, well, it did.
Here in Ontario, the province is planning to spend billions and billions on both road and transit projects, and is not demanding votes on every single one. That’s what politicians do when they actually believe in something: they get going, believing that they’ll be proven right in time for the next election. Dalton McGuinty believed in raising taxes for health care and in harmonizing provincial and federal sales taxes, unpopular as both those moves were at the time, so he did it. We re-elected him.
Kathleen Wynne is betting we’ll do the same for her despite the budget squeezes she’s imposing on schools and health care, the impending sale of most of Hydro One, the fiddling with the LCBO and the Beer Store, the Ontario pension plan. We’d probably vote against all these things if you asked us. But they’ll be necessary evils in the past by 2018, tiny matters against all the construction, a balanced budget and a growing economy (Wynne and her fellow Liberals hope), just like McGuinty’s taxes and Mike Harris’s cuts in the 1990s.
We get governments with vision by electing politicians with vision, not by trying to force leaders to do things they don’t believe in.