Metro Vancouver mayors lay out transit funding ideas
The title comes from the CBC story, but the mainstream media are all over this today. Unfortunately to get the Minister’s response you have to go to the paywalled Sun – and this being the beginning of the month, you probably won’t have to pay. But if you do, don’t bother becuase it is all entirely predictable.
UPDATE – as you would expect the media are catching up and Jeff Nagel now has this piece summarizing the reactions including those of the minister. So you don’t have to worry about paywalls at the Sun and Globe.
It doesn’t matter how good these ideas are. Nor even how acceptable. Mary Polak isn’t going to make any decision.
“We’re nowhere near a decision that says whether it’s on or it’s off,” Polak said Wednesday. “There just isn’t enough information yet.”
Polak said mayors have made “good progress” in making the case for new funding sources for TransLink.
But she said she’d need greater detail, including how much new money in total mayors envision raising for TransLink and the timing of major rapid transit lines in Vancouver and through Surrey to White Rock and Langley.
“They’re referencing Broadway corridor SkyTrain as well as the Surrey one,” Polak said. “We need them to find consensus on what would come first.”
There is an election coming up, and the BC Liberals are already laying out their appeal in the adverts that you, the taxpayer, are funding. “Lowest income tax” and all that. Indeed as you would expect
Jordan Bateman with the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation doesn’t like any of the ideas. “I think it’s absolutely abysmal news for taxpayers,” he said. “I think taxpayers are going to be up in arms over this.”
The right wing frames the debate: characterizing all taxation as bad, and all government spending as wasteful and inefficient. They also like to create the illusion that we “can’t afford” any new public expenditures and we are taxed to the max. Nothing could be further from truth, of course.
But to return to the Minister – the reason she is not going to be making any announcement is she doesn’t have to, and anyway it won’t be her who makes the decision. That comes much later – and even in the very unlikely event of yet another BC Liberal government, is not likely to fall to her. It will, make no mistake, be a provincial decision.
Indeed, it is the height of chutzpah to maintain the fiction that the Mayors get to make any contribution to it. The reason that there is only a Mayor’s Council at all is that when they were on the Translink Board they did not understand that their opinion only counted when they agreed with provincial priorities. They dared question the Canada Line and insisted that the Evergreen Line proceed at the same time. It is exceedingly ridiculous that they are now being chided that they have not come up with a set of priorities for rapid transit – the Broadway versus Surrey debate. Obviously both are needed, for quite different reasons. But in any event, the tame “professional” board showed that they understood provincial priorities when they started to cut – sorry, reallocate – transit service – but protected spending on the newer, much wider Patullo Bridge.
The Province does not really care about transit – any more than it cares about greenhouse gas emissions. It just recognizes that at times it has to appear as though it does.
The only new item on the list is a regional addition to the soon to be reinstated provincial sales tax. Adding 0.5% within Metro is said to raise $250m a year – and presumably is thought small enough that it will not drive more cross boundary shopping. Sales tax is a frequently used funding device in the United States, but its use here would be innovative and would require legislation.
The vehicle levy is back on the table too – which also requires more provincial legislation. It has been one of the legally approved sources for Translink since its creation, but has never been implemented.
They would also like a slice of the carbon tax – and a look at road pricing for the future. Neither of those are going to happen as they are both contrary to current government policy. The carbon tax is only to be used to lower income tax (“revenue neutral” – the same phrase that stuck us with the hugely increased costs of UPass) and tolls are only permitted on new roads/bridges.
Again, the province does not have to look at any of the proposals in any objective fashion. It simply has to appeal to affordability for families (cue the CTF). Odd that Christy still seems wedded to the idea that somehow she can get women to vote for her if she says the word “family” often enough without actually doing anything to help them.
What we are seeing is a ritual dance. We simply keep going round in circles until the music stops. The Mayors play along because most of them are “free enterprise” voters – and mostly supporters of the BC Liberals. Though they would never admit the link. They wear labels like “non-partisan” – but easily cross over to provincial politics when the opportunity is presented.
The real argument ought to be why there is no money for transit when there is always money for roads. Why the province has foregone provincial revenues from royalties in order to promote yet more natural gas extraction at a time when that market is actually glutted and prices are dropping, and are now competitive with coal. Why the province has shifted from a progressive, general revenue source (income tax) to a regressive, dedicated source (Medical Service Premiums). Why is it that transit spending always has to be cast in the light of a purely local service that municipalities must pay for, when they do not have an adequate source of revenue?
This is not a new debate. It is the same one we have been having ever since operating streetcars ceased to be profitable for the private sector. And the province of BC has always been calling the shots – taking credit for the few successes and passing the blame along for the inevitable failures. Cutting the ribbon on the big projects – invisible when critical issues like “where’s my bus?” surface.
There is one additional source I have failed to mention: “a share of increased land value along transit corridors.” Isn’t that what property tax does? Or should do? Has not the land value around – to take one example – Marine Drive Station – shot up? It is no longer empty industrial land but a major mixed use development (mostly housing). Of course, much of that increase goes to the City – and as we know, incremental residential tax revenues are less than the incremental cost of services for the new residents. So we add some premium levy on the property value increment that the developer has to pay – “value capture”. You know what happens then? The developers go elsewhere: there are always other places where the premium will not apply. A similar scheme was mooted to pay for Toronto’s Sheppard Subway – which lasted as long as the first announcement from a developer that if he had to pay a levy to the TTC he would do his development in the suburbs where the levy would not apply and not help pay for the station beneath it.
It is part of the lesson that all should understand. That when you alter taxes you change the incentives. Raise the gas tax and people drive less. Raise the carbon tax – same response. Impose a land value increment levy and watch the development move to less transit oriented areas.
We do not need any of these five proposals. What we need is an end to the sweetheart deals on natural gas – indeed an end to all fossil fuel subsidies. We will need a congestion tax but there has to be a viable alternative in place for trip making first. A congestion tax – or road pricing – cannot reduce congestion if the only way to make the trip is driving. We will also need a lot of work on figuring out how to protect personal privacy. The smart meter fuss will appear trivial in comparison. So yes to road pricing but not yet – and we need new revenues right now.
In the meantime, we have to abandon MSP and go back to the sort of income tax levels we had twenty years ago. The rich must pay more tax, and their opportunities to evade and avoid have to be eliminated. And that cannot apply just to Metro Vancouver – or even just to BC. There has to be a National Transit Strategy – and a Ministry of Cities in Ottawa. We cannot continue to talk about transportation as though land use was some sort of exogenous variable. We cannot talk about paying for transit as though that can only fall on residents of areas that have good transit service now. We cannot talk about health as though only expenditures on building and running hospitals count. More walking, cycling and transit will improve health and also cut hospital costs, incidentally.
We have to stop the ritual dance, and start having a real conversation about what sort of urban society we want in a post carbon, sustainable future.
And I won’t be holding my breath until that happens.
Stephen Rees's blog 
Fantastic blog. I woke up in a pre-election depression today.
Susan Chapelle
February 6, 2013 at 11:04 am
Failure to see where expenditures in one ministry affect expenditures in another is an epidemic amongst our elected officials. Large businesses all know how to move money from one division to another, shift funds to/from subsidiaries and even move it across borders to best advantage, but the big “businesses” operating out of the Parliament buildings in Victoria and Ottawa seem willfully ignorant of these tactics. Instead each ministry seems to operate in competition with all the others for funding. Taxpayers are never going to get good value under those circumstances.
I saw something on the TV news recently that offered a ray of hope: many suburban “business parks” (a term I suspect you hate as much as I do) have high vacancy rates. At the same time there is a building boom around transit lines.
As for funding transit, you’ve said it all so well I have nothing to add.
David
February 6, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Reblogged this on Get Your Head Into It and commented:
Sales taxes are used to fund transit in the US. Maybe we should do the same thing in BC
leehaber
February 6, 2013 at 4:50 pm
David, I would not cheer the demise of suburban business parks. It is good to have increasing density in already highly developed areas, to aid with urbanity, vitality, transit viability, etc., but not all businesses will choose to go there. And we need high quality job space in the suburbs, if we are ever to improve them.
Adam Fitch
February 6, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Stephen, that was a great piece. Lots of very astute observations and ideas.
A couple of comments. If you broke up that loooong screed into lots of smaller paragraphs, with headings, it would be more readable, and more effective.
On the point about municipal politicians being liberals, I do agree, to a certain degree, that that is true. But I would put it somewhat differently. A lot of successful politicians are really truly non-partisan, or at least non-aligned. To be crude about it, they are political opportunists. If they see the opportunity to jump from the local political arena to the provincial or the federal level, some will take it, and the party is asecondary issue for them, or even not an issue at all.
I bet that not too many of your average citizens would be able to say what party Gordon Campbell, Gordon Gibson, Mke Harcourt, Christy Clark, or David Anderson was in BEFORE they went into provincial or federal politics.
I kind of think of politics in the same way as professional team sports. The greatest athletes just want to play for a good, competitve team, in a good, well-run league. I don’t know too much about it, but it does seem to me that there are a lot of hockey players who seem to change teams a lot.
But anyway, the overall point that you were making was valid, that some of these municipal politicians do not want to go head-to-head with the province on this matter. I do not think that it has so much to do with political party affiliation though, or even ideology, as it does with just plain pragmatism. They do not see that they have the power base to sin that fight. better to play nicely and hope for incremental increased funding.
Whether that will be successful or effective in improving transit, I am doubtful, but that is the political reality. If a popular local politician like Diane Watts does not see an upside in picking that fight, even at a time like now when it appears likely that the Liberal govenment will fall in a few months, then I think that she has done the political calculus right.
Adam Fitch
February 6, 2013 at 5:56 pm
The “looong screed” was a temporary hiccup. I have no idea why inserting a blockquote of the Minister’s remarks would screw up the formatting of all that came after, but that is what happened. It was not visible on my editing screen, but as soon as I became aware of it, I went back and fixed it, which took longer than the problem appearing.
Apart from Corrigan of Burnaby, I do not know that any of the Mayors have declared support of the NDP. Please let me know who the others are – if there are any. Most are not at all apolitical – they are supporters of free enterprise – they come from a small business background and they believe in Samuel Smiles. They came of age at Rotarian lunches and Board of Trade dinners. The Non-partisan label is bogus. They are all right of centre – the only difference is how far right. And note too the NDP has had to shift rightwards to get elected. No wonder Glen Clark fits so well into the Jim Pattison empire.
But when I ran for the Green Party my pitch started with the factual statement that both capitalism and socialism have demonstrably failed. Right now the fight between the BC Liberals and the NDP is between two very similar sets of opportunists. Note the remarks by Harry Lali (NDP Transportation spokesperson) on the CBC tonight. He could not commit to a new tax to support transit. The Ministry of Road Construction does not notice if the Minister is Liberal or NDP – they go right on with blacktop politics as usual. Highways matter because BC is huge and mostly empty or rural. Transit is an obsession of two small areas in the south west corner – and thus mostly irrelevant politically, given our electoral system that values rural votes at double urban ones.
Stephen Rees
February 6, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Unfortunately investment in good transit is again being portrayed as something we cannot afford, and not as a tool through which many people can save alot of time and money.
The problem we have in our region, is that the decision makers do not understand how good transit and land use planning are solutions to our congestion and high transportation cost problems. Yet, where would we be if we didn’t have what we have?
The CTF are again focusing on level taxation instead of value for taxation. They only see the taxes going up, and do not see what you get for the taxes…
Andrew
February 6, 2013 at 8:56 pm
“The CTF are again focusing on level taxation instead of value for taxation. They only see the taxes going up, and do not see what you get for the taxes…”
Well, of course not. They’re not for “taxpayers” as a whole, they’re an AstroTurf group representing disgruntled rich/well-off people who don’t want to pay for all this stuff that they don’t need because they’re well-off enough to not need it right now. To them, most of the people that DO use these services are part of Mitt Romney’s famous “47%”.
The issue isn’t so much the CTF, as the fact that the mainstream media around here will uncritically publish their tripe (and that of the Fraser Institute) without so much as a hint at their motives, let alone some form of counterbalance (my personal favourite from last year was the Province’s “TRANSLINK TAX GRAB” headline and first-page screed from Jordan Bateman himself, when road pricing was floated). Thus, the right wing rules the conversation, and we get to see Adrian Dix backpedaling Obama-style (only he didn’t wait to get elected) on proposed tax increases even though recent polling shows a huge majority would back increases to top-bracket and corporate taxes (among other taxes that apply almost exclusively to the rich).
And so, instead of talking about how we can make public services cost less, we’re being forced to equate public services with private ventures and determine the value of public service based on how much money it can rake in. All because of a few loud rich people who don’t want to pay for the society that they benefit from living in =/
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“I bet that not too many of your average citizens would be able to say what party Gordon Campbell, Gordon Gibson, Mke Harcourt, Christy Clark, or David Anderson was in BEFORE they went into provincial or federal politics. ”
Gordon Campbell is the one I can finger — he stuck to his principles when he went to the BC Liberals, coming off a stint as “Non-Partisan Association” (HA HA HA, oh how the right cracks me up sometimes) mayor of Vancouver.
lordsetar
February 7, 2013 at 3:40 am
[…] Here’s Stephen Rees’s take on the funding options and the futility of it […]
Richard Walton: How to fund regional public transportation – Mar 1 « Price Tags
February 18, 2013 at 5:19 pm
[…] Yes it will remove funding, but not because of any new action by the Mayors announced by this letter. What the Mayors are doing is what the Minister’s civil servants ought to have been doing – and probably were. The letter sets out an accurate account of the present arrangements – all of which have been put into place by the Ministry of Transportation. Except for the one thing the Mayors are allowed to do – approve funding from property tax. So they did that but only in a very limited fashion. Someone should have been telling Mary Polak – before she made her recent pronouncements – of the inevitable consequences of her inaction. She either wasn’t listening or did not care. Which is pretty much the conclusion I reached last time I wrote about this. […]
The Mayors vs The Minister | Stephen Rees's blog
March 1, 2013 at 10:01 am