The Vancouver Courier is pleased to welcome our newest columnist, veteran broadcaster Bill Good, who will tackle current events in the world of news and politics every other week. Good has had a lifetime career of broadcasting including in television sports, as a television news anchor, and as a radio talk show host. He has been awarded lifetime achievement awards from the Webster Foundation and the Radio and Television Digital News Association and an Honorary Doctorate of technology from BCIT.
You have probably heard the expression “there’s nothing like a hanging in a fortnight to focus the mind.”
That saying came to mind when I heard that the Liberals suddenly found the money to match a federal promise of $2.2 billion for transit in Metro Vancouver. The Liberals managed to skate through an election four years ago promising a referendum on transit spending. People were reluctant to reward TransLink and increase their taxes, so voters said no. Fast forward to today as congestion gets more and more frustrating and the NDP promises to finance the Broadway SkyTrain and Surrey Light Rail. The May election must have begun to feel like an impending hanging for the Liberals.
The Supreme Court of Canada overturned the government cuts to education and forced it to commit hundreds of millions of dollars back into the province’s public schools. Add to this, the government, feeling the heat over a very unfair Medical Services Plan which costs middle-income people as much as the very wealthy, has promised to cut the cost in half before eliminating it altogether, probably before the election after this one. My sense is the Liberals still feel vulnerable after 16 years in power, and with the feds coming in with a $2.2-billion commitment to transit, the Liberals felt the need to move, and move now.
It will be interesting to see if the NDP promise to fund transit as well will negate the Liberal claim that the NDP is in the practice of turning down all big projects that create jobs. Building transit will provide a lot of union work.
Transit may provide something else. With transit will come much more density with a lot of condo-style housing. It will be interesting to see if the three levels of government can find a way to make a sizable portion of that new housing more affordable than what’s available today.
So within just a few weeks before the election on May 9, we have the two main parties in agreement on education funding, MSP premiums and transit. No fair-minded person could suggest the Liberals were first on any of these files. They’ve been dragging, kicking and screaming on them. So will voters reward or punish them?
I think the degree to which they’ve matched the NDP on these issues indicates they are worried.
We don’t see the polling the government does. News organizations no longer spend the money on really expensive polling, but the government does, and its sudden moves on the above tells me they are worried. A wild card may be the Green Party. The polling we have seen shows the Greens growing support, especially on Vancouver Island, usually fertile ground for the NDP. Can John Horgan convince longtime NDP voters on the Island to stick with him for one more election? All this will be answered in a little more than two fortnights.
Bill Good is a veteran broadcaster currently heard daily on News 1130.
