No new transit tax without referendum

By Diane Duflot
October 21, 2015

B.C. Premier Christy Clark says that new taxes used to fund transit will have to be approved via another referendum before her government gives them the OK. This is a follow-up to her government’s 2013 election commitment that new transit funding put forth by Greater Vancouver’s mayors would need to be sanctioned by the voting public.

Meanwhile, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson questions why it’s acceptable for the province to allocate funds to hospitals, schools, highways and bridges elsewhere in the province without requiring referenda.

Clark indicated that this is because taxes aren’t being raised to pay for hospitals and schools, but that they are funded by an existing provincial tax base. The Premier also pointed out that Metro mayors are free to raise property taxes as a means of funding transit, but that they have not done so thus far.

Metro mayors are doing research on the viability of mobility pricing as a means of generating funds to pay for transit while also easing traffic congestion. Mobility pricing can involve bridge or road tolls, or charges for road use or distance travelled.

This type of proposal might be difficult to explain succinctly to voters in the event of another referendum, and many residents of the region were soured by the transit plebiscite that was held over the summer, during which many voters appeared to base their decisions on dissatisfaction with governance at TransLink. Such a proposal could be complex to explain to voters in the context of a referendum.

Clark still has faith in the process and thinks it likely that the mayors learned a lot from the last referendum. As a result, she expects that a second referendum might be easier.

In a conversation with The Vancouver Sun, she indicated that referenda sometimes fail the first time but succeed in a second attempt.

“The reason they generally passed the second time is the proponents, in this case the mayors, learned from their mistakes,” she said. “They learned how to get out there and engage the public in the proposal and really get out there and gauge the public’s support for it. But I don’t think the complexity is beyond most citizens’ ability to understand.”

Although Clark will not allow the mayors to impose a new transit tax without a referendum, she insisted that her motivation is to “get TransLink fixed.”

“I think we’ve got to fix TransLink so that people have confidence in the system, and once they have confidence in the system it will be easier to mayors to raise their one-third, I think. People didn’t say no to transit, they said no to TransLink, which is an organization they don’t trust, and they said no to new taxes,” she said.

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About Diane Duflot

Diane Duflot is a freelance writer and editor.

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