A Skytrain travels past the downtown skyline in Vancouver. (Darryl Dyck/For the Globe and Mail)



Vancouver's transit experiment



With the region's mayors struggling to keep their plebiscite from falling off the rails, Vancouver's transit vote could either become a model for funding massive infrastructure projects in Canadian cities or serve as an example of what not to do. Frances Bula reports

Canada’s first experiment in holding a public vote on whether to finance transit with a new tax has wobbled uncertainly down the track in Vancouver for the past two months.

As the country’s largest cities struggle with how to pay for the transit demand created by a new urban generation, the region will either lead the way with a unique method of funding transit or prove conclusively that asking the public to volunteer to pay taxes is an exercise in futility.

Voting ends May 29 with the Yes side continuing its massive advertising and telephone town-hall campaigns and the No side sporadically saying what a waste of money it all is. Results will be announced in either June or July.

If Yes campaigners in the Vancouver region manage to pull off a win, other cities and provinces will have to wonder whether they are going to be left behind when federal infrastructure money is doled out. Two Ontario regions have already pondered the referendum idea in the past five years, and other jurisdictions have quietly talked about it.

“One of the easiest things to do in government is say no to an idea because the municipality proposing it doesn’t have its funding in place.”

Transit referendums are a novelty for Canada (the only other one was in 1946, when voters had to approve a bond measure to build the Yonge line). But they’re becoming increasingly the main mechanism for getting new money in the United States.

“The U.S. experience has been that local agencies have been moving more aggressively into voter-referral processes to respond to funding challenges,” says Jason Jordan, the director of the Washington, D.C., non-profit Center for Transportation Excellence. “This has proven to be a politically palatable way to do this.”

But even American experts hope the U.S. model doesn’t spread to Canada.

“I think the precedent being set should be somewhat concerning. What you get with a referendum is a lot of over-simplification,” says Jarrett Walker, a public-transit planning consultant in Portland.

That certainly proved true in the Lower Mainland the past nine weeks. While the campaign sparked an unprecedented and often informative dialogue about transit, financing and political leadership, it also immediately generated a startlingly harsh debate, unleashing public anger typically only seen during throw-the-bums-out elections.

“I’ve had people tell me they’re voting No because they’re mad about the increase in MSP [medical service premium] fees,” said Jonathan Cote, the 33-year-old mayor of New Westminster, one of the 18 mayors stumping for a Yes vote. “It’s turned into a debate about the value of government.”

Vancouver Councillor Adriane Carr canvasses the Broadway-City Hall SkyTrain station to urge people to vote Yes in the upcoming transportation plebiscite, on May 12, 2015. (Jimmy Jeong/for The Globe and Mail)

The bitterest public responses in the conversation so far have been about whether the Lower Mainland’s transportation agency, or in fact any level of government, can be trusted with any money.

A sign of the vitriol level: The CEO of the TransLink agency was abruptly removed from his job a month before the vote because, the board chair said, of the lack of public confidence people had in management.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said mayors across the country have told him they’re unimpressed with the idea of having a plebiscite for funding basic infrastructure.

“[The referendum’s] definitely not seen as a positive approach to funding essential infrastructure,” said Mr. Robertson, who met with the country’s big-city mayors February in Ottawa to lobby for housing and transit money in the federal budget.

Canada’s metropolitan regions, like those in the U.S., are seeing a demographic, cultural and economic shift. Millennials, retiring boomers and businesses are gravitating to densifying city centres and transit-friendly locations.

When the demographic tide was flowing the other way in the 1950s, as the young boomers ditched cities for the family friendly suburbs, federal governments threw money at road-building and highway expansion.

But the transportation investment needed for the latest shift is proving more difficult to finance. Population growth alone – the new fares and property taxes of those moving in – isn’t enough to pay for it, because transit use goes up faster than population as cities densify. Transit projects that lift a city from one level of transit service to the next are extremely expensive and, if planning is done right, require investments to be made long before the future riders arrive.

A heated debate Mayors in the Vancouver area are asking residents to approve a sales-tax increase to pay for transit infrastructure. Here are some facts about the plebiscite and the mayors’ plan:

The process: Elections BC is holding a mail-in plebiscite. The first ballots were mailed out on March 16 and they must be in Elections BC’s hands by 8 p.m. on Friday, May 29. Anyone who does not have a ballot by now is out of luck – the deadline to request one was May 15. Technically, the vote is non-binding but the B.C. government asked for the referendum and has said it will abide by the results. The question: The ballot summarizes the plan and then asks a simple yes-or-no question: “Do you support a one-half-percentage-point (0.5-per-cent) increase to the Provincial Sales Tax in Metro Vancouver, dedicated to the Mayors’ Transportation and Transit Plan, with independent audits and public reporting?” The plan: The mayors are proposing $7.5-billion of transit and road improvements over 10 years. Highlights include: – A subway line along Vancouver’s east-west Broadway corridor. – New light-rail transit lines in Surrey and Langley. – An additional 400 buses for the region’s fleet – an increase of about 25 per cent – as well as 11 new B-line rapid bus routes. – More frequent bus and seabus service all day, especially at peak times. – A replacement for the Pattullo Bridge that spans the Fraser River between New Westminster and Surrey. – An additional 2,700 kilometres of bikeways, including 300 kilometres separated from vehicle traffic. The Yes side: The mayors themselves have been the main cheerleaders of the plan. which they’ve been promoting with a budget of at least $6-million from the Translink mayors’ council and contributions from various municipalities. The No side: Opposition to the proposed tax has been led by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Jordan Bateman, who says he’s been operating with a budget of about $40,000. He’s had support from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Three mayors voted against the proposed tax: West Vancouver’s Michael Smith, Maple Ridge’s Nicole Read and Burnaby’s Derek Corrigan.

Montreal, Ontario’s major cities and Vancouver have struggled to find revenue taps that could be turned on through legislation to pay for the big jump they need. Montreal has talked about taking a cut from development profits. Ontario’s Premier and various Toronto mayors have looked at different types of new taxes. No one has found the golden formula or been willing to take the unpopular plunge into imposing new taxes.

But the Premier of B.C., Canada’s outlier province with its penchant for referendums and recall initiatives, tossed out a promise during her election campaign last year to go the American route and put the question to the voters.

Lower Mainland mayors, who don’t have any direct control over TransLink, were less than enthused. But faced with no other options, 18 of the region’s 21 mayors have thrown themselves into championing the 10-year plan and the sales tax as their last hope.

The only polls that were done, prior to the start of voting March 16, indicated that the region’s 1.5 million voters were unlikely to say Yes.

Yes supporters quietly acknowledge their original hope was that turnout would be so low that it would give the more dedicated Yes voters an edge. In fact, turnout in every municipality has already exceeded what it was for municipal elections last fall, ranging at this point from a low of 37 per cent in Surrey to highs of 43 per cent in Vancouver and 45 per cent in Langley and North Vancouver. So it’s anyone’s guess.

Statistics from the U.S. Center for Transportation Excellence, funded by the transit industry, indicate that about 70 per cent of transit referendums in that country succeed, contrary to the stereotype that taxpayers, especially American ones, will never agree to pay more taxes.

No one is willing to place a bet on where Vancouver will fall on that data map. More like Los Angeles? Or more like Atlanta?

In L.A., where residents have traditionally been tax-averse, more than two-thirds agreed in 2008 to a half-per-cent sales-tax increase to pay for a 30-year, $40-billion transit-expansion plan. The campaign, led by then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, became the standard for how to win a transit referendum.

But in Atlanta, in one of the most resounding defeats in recent transit-financing memory, a small, Tea Party-like group of opponents with almost no budget managed to persuade local residents to reject, by almost a two-thirds majority, a proposal for a one-per-cent sales tax to pay for a raft of local projects. That 2012 proposal had been supported by a Republican governor, a Democrat mayor, several business groups and an $8-million campaign.

On paper, Vancouver should be following in Los Angeles’s train tracks. Local leaders have cobbled together a broad coalition: most of the region’s mayors, business groups, unions, the David Suzuki Foundation, the restaurant and food-service association, the YWCA, the federal port authority.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson speaks during a Mayors' Council transit tax referendum news conference, at Richmond-Brighouse Canada Line Station in Richmond, B.C., on Wednesday, Feb. 25 (Darryl Dyck/For the Globe and Mail)

Regional mayors are promoting the plan they developed last year that provided something for every part of the region, which should be another strong selling point.

And their opposition is comparatively puny. Like the group in Atlanta did, Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is operating with a laughable budget – about $40,000, he says.

His public supporters, aside from the reliably anti-tax Canadian Federation of Independent Business, have been mostly marginal figures.

But the messages from Mr. Bateman, who has devoted a significant part of his time the past couple of years to highlighting mismanagement at TransLink, have resonated with the public.

About 70 per cent of both No- and Yes-leaning voters said in the early polls and the numerous telephone town halls with mayors that they didn’t trust TransLink. People complained that it’s been two years since TransLink started installing faregates and developing smart cards, but the system still isn’t working; that the CEO’s near half-million-dollar salary (and the fact that he’ll still be getting it for a year after being removed from his job); and that a couple of spectacular recent breakdowns are proof things are dysfunctional.

“If this fails, I think it will force all these political people to get in the room and show some leadership to change TransLink,” Mr. Bateman said as he launched his campaign.

But all indications from American cities – where transit agencies are also unloved – are that this isn’t what happens. Instead, local politicians resign themselves to a transit mess. Or they get the money elsewhere. Or they try again and succeed.