Press candidates on housing, transportation

BARB DESJARDINS, FRED HAYNES, LISA HELPS, ROB MARTIN, CLIFF McNEIL-SMITH, KEVIN MURDOCH, GEOFF ORR, JOHN RANNS, DAVID SCREECH, MAJA TAIT, KEN WILLIAMS and STEW YOUNG

We’ve recently seen progress on some of the pressing issues in our communities. And we’ve seen this progress because all orders of government are working together.

On child care, the federal and provincial governments signed an agreement to offer affordable, high-quality child care to all British Columbians by 2022. This is something mayors and other community leaders have been pushing for and we’re pleased to see this roll out.

When it comes to housing and homelessness, our communities have seen — and made — significant investments. This includes the $120-million regional, provincial, and federal Regional Housing First Program that will see close to 400 shelter rate and 1,600 rental and affordable homes built across the region.

It also includes the Rapid Housing Initiative, through which the CRD has received just over $24 million to build housing for those exiting homelessness.

Working together, our local governments, the province and the federal government are fasttracking these new permanent supportive homes, and funding them with the supports that people need. And we’re concentrating these housing units in appropriate areas of our region, so we can keep the rural areas intact, preserving both biodiversity and farmland.

Yet even with these significant investments in child care and housing, there is still more work to do to improve quality of life.

We’re calling on all candidates and those elected to office to advocate for and deliver on sustainable transportation solutions, to continue to address homelessness and housing affordability, to help us as local governments work with our residents and business owners to prepare for a changing climate, and to develop fairer funding for local governments.

Too many of our residents spend too much time stuck in traffic. This is not sustainable and it’s also not good for health, well-being and stress levels.

We’ve been advocating for more sustainable transportation solutions for our region for years, and we hope that this next federal government — working in partnership with our local governments and the provincial government — will start to deliver.

Key priorities include improving access to transit for local First Nations and implementation of RapidBus from the West Shore to downtown, from downtown up the Peninsula, and along other major corridors to make transit a convenient choice. We also need significant federal investment to fully electrify the B.C. Transit fleet in our region; this is an expensive proposition, but the long-term benefits, both economically and environmentally, are huge.

We want serious consideration of a West Shore to downtown ferry and the investments required from all orders of government to make this a reality. And, if not the revival of rail on Vancouver Island right now — with the Vancouver Island population rapidly nearing one million people — we need to federal and provincial governments to work with First Nations to preserve the rail corridor for the long term.

And finally, the Belleville Terminal, a key transportation linkage with the United States and an economic engine in our region, must be reopened as soon as possible. The next federal government should immediately reinstate Canada Border Service Agency personnel at Belleville Terminal, redesignate it as a port-of-entry and set a date for the marine border reopening.

Housing is also a critical issue. Some of the people who work in our communities can’t afford to live in them, and the prospect of home ownership is out of reach for many. We need federal incentives, tax policies and other levers to help increase the supply of housing of all types.

And we need continued and increased federal investment in the Rapid Housing Initiative and Reaching Home program. To provide supports with housing where needed, an increase to the Canada Health Transfer to provinces is important so the B.C. government has more discretionary funding to invest in addressing mental health and providing treatment.

With respect to climate change, the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report revealed that there’s still a window open to mitigate the gravest impacts of climate change. To do this, local governments need stable, predictable non-grant-based funding to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, from building energy retrofits to cooling centres to addressing sea level rise.

And with so many cost pressures being downloaded to local governments, we call for stable, predictable funding more generally. The next federal government should start by permanently doubling the Canada Community Building Fund (formerly the gas tax). And it should create a federal, provincial/ territorial and local government working group to modernize the local government finance system in Canada that includes providing municipalities with a broader range of sustainable, predictable and reliable funding tools.

In this election we have come together as mayors to urge our residents to press the candidates on these key issues. If they are taken seriously and addressed by the next federal government, our region will be a better place to live, for everyone.