With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/347582
42 BCBusiness August 2014 run its own system. And it said, "We will stop assessing your residents and busi- nesses a tax for part of the cost of major hospital projects, the way we do every- where else. That will give you enough room to charge extra for transit. Then you decide what you want to do and how much you want to pay for it." Since the long-suffering taxpayers in the rest of B.C. paid the not-insignifi- cant amount of $383 million in hospital taxes in 2013, while Lower Mainland taxpayers paid not one dime for hospi- tal-building projects, that seems to be a fair point. But there's a little sleight of hand there, point out transit officials. Yes, the transit tax in the Lower Main- land was about $240 per household in 2012 while the luckless residents of Vic- toria paid $280 for transit and hospitals combined (numbers from the province's most recent passive-aggressive attack, the 2012 TransLink review). But those calculations never take into account the fact that people in the Lower Main- land don't just pay for transit through their property taxes; they also pay through their higher fuel taxes, which are 17 cents more per litre in the Lower Mainland than outside it. So someone in Langley who drives 20,000 kilometres a year—2,000 litres of gas a year for a relatively fuel-efficient car—is paying an extra $340 every year toward transit as well as property taxes. As a person's calculator starts smok- ing with all these numbers, it's easy to see why no one really has a handle on who is paying for what. Indeed, it may seem pointless, all these calculations— except, perhaps, to set a benchmark of how much a state or province is spend- ing overall per capita on all forms of transportation, so that people get some comfort from seeing that, ultimately, the $1.6-billion Canada Line does balance out against this highway or that one. What would work better is if the people in charge stuck to the message that different parts of a big economy need different things. Cities need big transit projects; rural areas need highways. Unfortunately, most states or prov- inces tend to tilt one way or the other, says transportation consultant Jarrett Walker. Jurisdictions dominated by cities, like California, tend to set up political fights and tax regimes that ben- efit cities. States and provinces that see themselves as primarily rural, like Indi- ana, set up barriers and fights that ben- efit the rural areas—as B.C. seems to be doing. And both engage in unproductive squabbles about unchangeable realities. "Any time we spend on a province-wide argument, it is going to devolve into whether cities are a good thing," says Walker. "That is pointless." One observer on the other side of the country, in a region involved in its own fractious disputes over transit spending, worries the pointlessness is not deterring anyone. "I'm seeing political disputes accelerate because it's good exploitation," says Steve Munro, a Toronto transit advocate and frequent public commentator who helped fight to preserve that city's streetcar system decades ago. His province recently went through a provincial election campaign, where the Progressive Conservative leader—battling an incumbent premier who promised $740 million a year for transit through new aviation and tobacco taxes—told Ottawa residents at one point that "you don't have to pay for transit in Toronto." Munro says that's discouraging and he's not sure why it's happening. "Maybe it's because we're moving away from a social philosophy of 'We're all in this together.' But the resentment of 'He's getting some and I'm not' is pretty generic." Then again, Premier Kathleen Wynne triumphed in Ontario—new taxes, transit funding for the cities, and all. So maybe it's possible for peace to break out in B.C., too. ■ FARM FRIENDLY Chilliwack Mayor Sharon Gaetz sees city transit as a way of decreasing pollutants that fall on farmland.