Re: “No Vote punishes the young,” March 11.
The young won’t be able to afford to live in Metro Vancouver let alone transit fare if TransLink and Metro Vancouver Mayors continue their tax-and-spend binging that has gone on far too long. The new tax would add a further cost burden for residents of an average of another $250 per year.
As taxes rise, so does the cost of living, which seriously affects the young when they are just starting out in life and find they cannot even afford to leave their parents home. A No vote to the proposed PST transit tax increase would send the message residents are fed up and will no longer tolerate all the deception and unaccountable, wasteful behaviour by TransLink and Metro mayors.
According to the Canadian Consumer tax index published in 2014 by the National Post, Canadians already pay 42 per cent of their income in various taxes, with Metro Vancouver residents also enduring the highest cost of living in the country. This makes it critically important that residents get answers to some serious questions before agreeing to hand over another penny of their hard earned dollars.
A key question is why Metro Vancouver residents alone are being made responsible for the cost of transit development? Responsibility for funding the construction of vital infrastructure within B.C.’s economic engine — Metro Vancouver — should be shared by all residents and businesses through governance by the provincial and federal government, not by unelected TransLink fat cats.
TransLink and the mayors want Metro Vancouver residents to fork over another $250 million in taxes a year to the TransLink coffers for a wish list of projects for which absolutely no financial details has been provided. This is on top of the 1.4 billion a year TransLink currently receives in funding from the 0.17 cents a liter of gas at the pumps and a huge chunk of our property taxes, which keep rising.
The mayors claim that from their seven billion in annual spending, with a projected growth of 4.8 per cent annually, they are also unable to identify a single penny of cost savings to support their transit plan. Yet it has been established by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that they have the necessary funding sources without any tax increase.
It has been far too easy for politicians and government bureaucrats to keep going to the taxpayers instead of providing effective budgeting and securing greater operating efficiencies.
A No vote is about funding sources and mismanagement, not against transit which proponents of a Yes vote keep trying to make it. It is time we stop giving Metro mayors and TransLink a blank cheque.
David Matthews, Vancouver
