On behalf of the newspaper industry, I’d like to thank CP Rail and the City of Vancouver for their very public fight over the future of the Arbutus Corridor. At least somebody’s making money off of this thing. To wit:

CP, losing the public relations battle when it razed the gardens of horticultural squatters along its tracks, attempted to regain some public sympathy Monday when it took out a full-page ad in The Sun and the city’s other major newspapers. The ad was entitled “Clarity and Context: On CP’s Discussions with the City of Vancouver over the Arbutus Corridor,” and it was written by CP chief executive officer E. Hunter Harrison — at least, that’s his illegible scrawl at the bottom of the page.

Harrison’s main points can be summed up as:

• The City of Vancouver is being a real dillhole by offering a laughably small sum of money for the corridor.

And:

• No, I mean really laughable, like you’d pee yourself.

“At the heart of the issue,” Harrison writes, “is the value of the corridor. Based on independent third-party proposals using the value of the adjoining lands — the standard method for assessing this type of rail corridor — the Arbutus corridor has been valued at more than $400 million. As this was done a number of years ago, the value is significantly higher today.”

In the interests of the citizens of Vancouver, Harrison wrote, CP was prepared to accept “far less” — a reported $100 million — which, you know, is practically an act of philanthropy. The city offered $20 million. In CP’s book, that’s practically an act of thievery.

Alternative proposals suggested by CP were also rejected by the city, Harrison wrote — including “small portions of the corridor rezoned for development by CP with the remainder donated to the city,” or a straight land swap of city land of equal value being given over to CP.

Harrison wasn’t available for comment Monday, but CP vice-president of corporate affairs Mark Wallace spoke with me. He was handling the Arbutus file for CP, he said.

“We think we’ve been more than reasonable,” Wallace said. “We think the value of the corridor is well in excess of $400 million, and we’re only asking a fraction of that price, and we’re still not there.

“The city asked me to give it one last shot (after negotiations fell through), and asked me to stop work on the corridor pending that one last meeting. So we did. On Sept. 12, I flew to Vancouver and met with the city ... Unfortunately, the city was not in a position to move significantly off the position where they were. They did not have any new creative ideas in terms of how to generate value for us. ... So we walked away at the end of the day.”

Wallace refused to say which of its properties adjoining the corridor it had proposed to the city for rezoning, or how many properties it was asking for in a land swap. So much for clarity and context.

As for the future, Wallace said, CP would be returning its work crews to the corridor and have the line operational “by the end of the year.” Several ideas were being considered for its use, he said — railcar storage, a training ground for crews, a rail-welding facility for track upgrades. I’m sure westsiders will be thrilled with any of them.

“One thing we know is the rail line is going to earn its keep,” Wallace said. “It’s not going to sit there for the next decade.”

Bluster? Another negotiating ploy? Time will tell.

At City Hall, however, the ad seems only to have solidified council’s position. Coun. Heather Deal, speaking on behalf of the city, said:

“I’m very disappointed in (the ad). It’s going over territory we’ve already covered and we’d much rather be sitting at the table with CP. But we won’t be bullied into spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money for land that has value as a transportation corridor, not residential.”

But at that point in the interview, Deal allowed that there was the possibility, or at least the potential, that the corridor could see residential development along it some time in the future.

“If it were to happen in the future, then there would be some kind of a letter of understanding with CP around sharing that value change. We’re willing to have that conversation with them, but we are very steadfast that it is going to be retained as a transportation corridor, and that’s the value of the land at this time.”

The parameters of this deal, then, would seem to be mutable. Which is to say, the city would share the partial value of any change to residential use along the corridor with CP for land the railway previously owned and wanted to develop itself, but which it would have had to sell to the city at a devalued price on the basis that the city maintained the land would never be used for anything but transportation. Who’s railroading whom?

For the record, I think $20 million for 11 kilometres of real estate through the country’s most expensive neighbourhoods is ludicrously low, transportation corridor or not.

Unlike CP, though, I don’t have to take out a full-page ad to say so.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com

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