Tax vote was a rejection of elitist busybodies
Here we are, a week after Metro Vancouver voters learned that they had killed the proposed TransLink sales tax, and the dust still hasn’t settled. You can barely turn on a radio or read a newspaper without some bitter Yes supporter lamenting their loss and lashing out to blame someone.
Those who supported giving ever higher taxes to that endlessly gluttonous beast called TransLink have been variously blaming Premier Christy Clark (for holding the vote), Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Association (for what they consider unfair criticism of TransLink), the Metro Vancouver mayors (for botching the sales job on their transportation plan), drivers (for daring to prefer driving over taking transit) and even the voters in general (for not being altruistic enough, to quote a recent letter to the editor.)
The pity party, I suspect, will go on for weeks, months, perhaps even years, especially whenever a local politician or transportation policy wonk blames future traffic congestion on the dolt voters of 2015 who couldn’t see the brilliance of the mayors’ $7.5-billion plan.
It’s the underlying assumption and arrogance of all these comments that bother me.
What the Yes promoters are actually saying is that the result of the plebiscite was wrong — that it failed. These elitists who support imposing higher taxes on the working folks of this region are claiming that they know better than the average voter.
If Yes proponents, many of whom stood to profit from the plan, want to blame their loss on anything, they should consider their own arrogance in trying to push higher taxes on a population that has consistently told them for months that they are tapped out.
The plebiscite didn’t fail, it was a glorious success. By the standards of local elections, it had a high turnout and citizens were extremely engaged in the debate about what to do about transportation in the region. And with 62 per cent of voters rejecting the proposed tax, the plebiscite delivered a clear message to politicians about how much taxpayers are willing to spend on transportation.
The vote was democracy in action, something all the sore losers on the Yes side should try to get through their heads. It’s stunning the number of people lamenting that voters were actually given a say on the issue of transportation funding, arguing that the politicians should have just stuck people with the additional transit tax, as if that were somehow more fair. It’s not clear to me, given the two-to-one opposition to the tax, how that would have been acceptable.
The No vote is being interpreted in many ways by different people, usually to suit their purposes — that taxpayers can’t afford another tax, that people don’t trust TransLink with more money and or that people didn’t like the plan because it gave more to some communities than others.
Those all are true, but I think something else went on with the No vote. A large number of voters simply resented being told how to live their lives, especially from the exclusive “let them eat cake” club of supercilious politicians, developers and business people, university and union fat cats and sneering eco-activists in the Yes camp.
That would include former Vancouver city councillor Gordon Price, who was appointed director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University despite having zero professional credentials in planning.
Price has lots to say about how cities should be built, but as a West End resident who can walk to work and who has never had to deal with the transportation issues involved in raising kids, his endless, derisive opinions on drivers gets a little hard to take. Price — and many other like him, especially in Vancouver — simply have no clue about the real transportation needs of other people, particularly hard-working suburbanites who drive our economy. It should surprise no one that voters in the eastern end of Metro Vancouver rejected the transit tax in the largest numbers — the idea that public transit will ever be a workable solution for most of them is absurd.
As much as Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson or others might think that the peasants should spend up to four hours a day commuting by transit as part of their dubious green schemes, as opposed to driving in comfort in half the time, the answer of most people was, “No, thanks!”
And who can blame them, especially when they see that Robertson is once again jetting halfway around the world to deliver yet another message about how people shouldn’t burn fossil fuels, this time for an audience with the Pope. Sheesh, if he really cared about climate change, you’d think he’d send a letter or, better yet, an email. As usual with these guys, it’s do as I say and not as I do.
As Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin noted on Saturday, the real winner of the plebiscite was the car. He’s right, but it’s more than that. What voters are saying, ultimately, is that they know better than politicians and urban visionaries about how to plan their lives. They’ve had enough of official busybodies who ignore their wishes, and the plebiscite gave them a chance to say so.
Gordon Clark is a columnist and the editorial pages editor.