Who’s driving this train?
TransLink in transit: Mayors deliver on province’s request for 30- year plan, only to be given swift no
Whatever one thinks of the mayors’ plan for the future of transit in Metro Vancouver, this much can be said about it: At least it’s a plan. What Premier Christy Clark thinks about the future of Metro transit remains a mystery — and will, I suppose, until the path of least electoral resistance becomes clear to her. At present, she’s preoccupied with transporting hydrocarbons, not people.
Transportation Minister Todd Stone, meanwhile, has been so bereft of ideas and so wobbly in his portfolio he needs training wheels.
And rather than lead on transit, Clark and Stone have chosen, instead, to govern from behind. They have chided the mayors. They have said no to the mayors. And sometime within the next year they will ask the public to vote in a transit referendum that is in reality a judgment on the mayors. What that referendum will ask, or what it will propose, we don’t know. But of this we can be sure: While Clark feels that the future of Metro transit deserves so little attention from her that she would allow a referendum on it — in effect, sidestepping the issue — she would never allow the public the same chance to cast a deciding vote on the transportation of oil. That’s a pipe dream: hers.
The whole process has been an exercise in deflection. In February, the mayors were given a June 30 deadline by the province to come up with a 30- year plan for transit in Metro Vancouver. A 30- year plan in five months. This is what the provincial government regards as planning.
So, in five months’ time, Metro Vancouver’s mayors had to co- ordinate all their constituencies’ wish lists — all of them different — and then they had to agree on which projects to propose. Then they had to decide on the future funding sources for those projects.
“It was very difficult,” said Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore, who chaired the mayors’ working group.
“There were a lot of needs around the region, and the first thing we did was ask all the subregions what they needed. Believe me, there were a lot more proposals left on the table than made it into the plan.”
Within the ridiculous time frame allowed them, the mayors got their act together and agreed on the plan ( except for Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, who, in his usual role of contrarian, cast the lone nay vote, saying the plan was too rich for his tastes.) They
presented it to the province with three weeks to spare.
The mayors do all the heavy lifting. They come up with the ideas. They take all the political risks, and will suffer all the predictable public complaints — from car owners, mainly, who believe money spent on public transit is a waste since they won’t get out of their cars, or insist they can’t.
Central to the future funding of their plan — which calls for an increase in TransLink’s annual budget to $ 2.2 billion from the present $ 1.4 billion — would be the redirection of $ 250 million of the B. C. carbon tax that is generated locally in Metro Vancouver.
To me, that seems like a sound idea. Half of the B. C. population resides here. Metro Vancouver generates half of the provincial economy. Why not use the carbon tax, as we now do the fuel tax, to help fund TransLink so that we might increase public transit to alleviate our reliance on the automobile, cut down on our production of greenhouse gases and serve the million more people projected to be moving to Metro Vancouver within the next three decades? The province’s answer? No. Stone, in a press conference called close on the heels of the plan’s unveiling, said there was “no chance” the provincial government would approve the funding reallocation because it would take money from provincialwide revenues.
But he would, he said, consider the creation of a new separate regional carbon tax for Metro Vancouver.
Presenting Metro Vancouverites with another tax to fund TransLink, on top of the property, fuel and parking taxes, along with fare increases and bridge tolls? Good luck with that.
Maybe it will be proposed in the upcoming referendum, where it will be sure to be defeated.