Op-ed: Libs offer bad leadership on critical transit issue

By George Heyman, Special to the Province

When it comes to transit planning in Metro Vancouver, the B.C. Liberal government has offered one bad idea after another. Now it’s time to put those bad ideas behind them and start again. Their insistence on a referendum, while failing to quickly define the question, has added additional delay to much-needed transit improvements throughout the region. Even a planned 306,000-hour expansion of bus service was cancelled due to a funding shortfall.

On its own, the decision to leave the future of transit in Metro Vancouver in the hands of a referendum — and blame the mayors in Metro Vancouver for the resulting delay — indicates that the Liberal government is refusing to show leadership on this defining issue. But worse still, the Liberals have created further uncertainty by failing to agree on the basic details of their ill-conceived plan.
Premier Christy Clark and Transportation Minister Todd Stone have been at odds over when the referendum would be held, the form of question that should be asked, and even whether the government should advocate for the referendum to succeed.
The minister soon fell in line with the premier’s suggestion that the referendum be combined with municipal elections in November — but this week, another day brought yet another plan, as the premier told reporters she would consider delaying the referendum until after the municipal elections. She bowed to pressure as voters, communities and businesses are still in the dark about details of the referendum question, with just 10 months to go.
For years, the Liberal government has cynically delayed taking action to address our overloaded and underfunded transit system. Now it’s time for them to stop trying to salvage their bad idea, and instead sit down with the region’s mayors to agree on a fair and equitable funding plan for the region’s transit future — a plan they committed to reaching with the mayors in a 2010 signed agreement.
If they fail to do so, people in Metro Vancouver will continue paying the price for years to come. It’s not just livability, estimates of the provincewide economic cost of congestion in our region run as high as $1.5 billion per year — that is goods that are delayed in getting to our ports, service and other workers stuck in traffic and lost productivity.
Already, this bungled referendum plan has ensured that pressing needs for improvements across the system — south of the Fraser in fast-growing communities like Surrey and Langley, along the Broadway corridor, or throughout our underfunded bus system — have been delayed.
And while the Liberal government waffles, people with limited mobility who depend on TransLink’s HandyDART have seen a seven-fold increase in service denials over the past three years.
A failed referendum — almost an inevitable conclusion given the way the Liberals are handling it — will result in steadily deteriorating transit services and even more widespread congestion problems. Our regional population is expected to grow by a million people over the next 20 to 30 years yet TransLink predicts that without new funding, per-capital service will decline to 2004 levels by 2020.
The Liberals have a long history of setting the stage for our region’s transit gridlock. In 2007, they intervened to sideline regional mayors and replace TransLink’s elected board members with unaccountable appointees. Then, in 2010, they announced that they would address TransLink’s funding problems — more than three years later, after rejecting every funding proposal suggested by regional mayors, the future of our transit system is in jeopardy.
The work of finding a funding model need not start from scratch. Since 2010, the region’s mayors have, in good faith, done the hard work on funding options. The government has been presented with a menu of proposals, supported by the region’s representatives. The vision for transit is there, most recently articulated in TransLink’s 2012 Moving Forward plan All we need from the province now is political will and leadership.
The B.C. Liberals need to put years of disrespectful treatment of the mayors, the business community and the residents of Metro Vancouver behind them, and get back to the table to put together an equitable transit funding formula. They need to show they care about the future of our region, the people who live here, and the importance of transit to the whole province’s economy.
George Heyman is the MLA for Vancouver-Fairview and the New Democrat Translink critic