It would take a minor miracle at this point to see any referendum on TransLink funding held during the upcoming municipal elections actually succeed.
North Vancouver District mayor and chair of the TransLink Mayor’s Council Richard Walton calls it a “terribly thought out piece of a strategy.” Following an in camera meeting two days ago of Metro Vancouver’s mayors making up the council, he said there was not a person in the room who disagreed.
Their view hasn’t changed since the moment Premier Christy Clark tossed out the idea during the provincial election campaign the Liberals were expected to lose.
If you wonder how little thought Clark initially gave to the proposal, consider how she simply confused the issue when she preposterously opined after her victory that the referendum question should be “multiple choice” and the province would play no role in promoting it.
It was her rookie minister of transportation Todd Stone who had to step in as clean-up guy. He immediately contradicted Clark, saying the question should require a simple yes or no answer and the province would play a major part in that campaign.
But now that eight months have passed we are no closer to knowing what that simple question will be.
If anything, with little more than 10 months until the municipal election, the mayors in the region are even more opposed to the referendum strategy. They consider it a material threat to whatever campaign they hope to launch in their individual attempts to get re-elected. They do not want to be sidetracked by an issue that is seen as an ill-defined tax grab for an even more ill-defined transit benefit.
And to make matters worse, instead of Stone attempting to bring the mayors on side, over the past week in a couple of media interviews he has taken to attacking them; blaming them for the funding problems and saying they should lean more heavily on homeowners by increasing property tax, which mayors have repeatedly resisted.
In the case of Surrey, he suggests it should phase in its proposals for light rail. Vancouver should consider a less expensive option for the Broadway corridor out to UBC than a new SkyTrain.
The mayors find themselves with neither resources nor power in this matter. But then B.C.’s provincial governments from Social Credit to NDP and now Liberal have regularly elbowed municipal types out of the way as they exercise their particular desires when it comes to transportation infrastructure. None have been more blatant in diminishing regional control than the B.C. Liberals.
The current bullying by Victoria goes back to 2008 when former premier Gordon Campbell’s transportation minister Kevin Falcon put through legislation that gave us the current neutered Mayor’s Council with all of the real decision making power placed in the hands of a “professional board.”
Falcon did that in response to the mayors’ reluctance to immediately vote in favour of placing the Canada Line project ahead of their long anticipated first priority, the Evergreen Line, to serve the northeast sector of the region.
The debate among the mayors over the Canada Line was lengthy and hard fought. In a huff, Falcon declared they were “dysfunctional” and stripped them of any meaningful power.
What Falcon also managed to do was effectively separate the planning for land development which lies with the mayors sitting on Metro’s board and transportation infrastructure policy and which is now in the hands of the province’s creation, the professional board at TransLink.
This causes Richard Walton to observe that “something is very obviously broken.” And it is the reason mayors have continuously lobbied, with little hope of significant success, for the return of their authority at TransLink for the past half dozen years.
Meanwhile at the hands of the province we have seen what Surrey mayor Dianne Watts told a Vancouver Board of Trade panel on public transit is a “mishmash of nonsense.” She was referring to the inconsistent and arbitrary nature of tolling and the responsibility for various bridges in the region.
But Watts may as well have been talking more generally about the pickle the whole region finds itself in facing a referendum with little chance of success and yet another damaging delay in achieving sustainable funding for much needed transit infrastructure.
