Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Toll politics and the BC economy

The first time we visited Enid and Isaac in Austen, we went to a gathering of a number of their best friends. It was all very congenial; it never occurred to me some of them saw the world in a fundamentally different way until we were talking health care. Several of them didn't have any. I thought this outrageous, and said so: “I know this is very Canadian of me, but I cannot understand a society that doesn't have universal health care.”
To which one clever young graduate student replied, “Well, I don't want it. I don't want to pay for all the people who smoke, or do drugs, or are too fat or stupid to look after themselves.”
And there was no dissuading her from that position: she simply could not accept that a system that covered everyone, even the fat and stupid, was actually less expensive than hers, and had much better outcomes.
Yet that is pretty-much universally understood in Canada, and one of the significant ways we distinguish ourselves from our neighbours to the south, for most of whom a universal-anything is anathema.
Yesterday, while listening to Stephen Quinn's afternoon show, I heard essentially that same American argument: why should someone in Fernie or Fort St John pay for the bridges into Vancouver? Even Quinn felt it useful to point out that if the tolls were removed the people who used the bridges would still be paying for it.
Of course they would!
Just like they and we pay for all the roads in BC. At present the government, leading up to the election, is playing “blacktop politics”, with roads that are paid for by all of us. They're part of the infrastructure we hold in common as citizens and tax-payers of BC, the very stuff that helps keep our economy rolling.
So it is really surprising to me (well, OK, I confess: not really) that somehow we have managed to get it into our heads that the bridges of the lower mainland are not part of the BC transportation system. Yet all pundits and experts appear to accept that this is the case: the CBC's legislative reporter, Richard Zussman, talking to Quinn in the episode I mentioned, took it for granted that both the BCLiberal and NDP positions on those bridge tolls was mere “retail politics”, implying they made no economic sense, and Gary Mason, in today's Globe cavalierly tosses off the following line, just as if he has some special knowledge: “Both policies are short-sighted and idiotic, but the NDP's perhaps more so.” 
Let us examine that proposition.
The bridges in question are the Golden Ears and the Port Mann, plus the proposed Massey Tunnel Replacement. Now either there is a compelling economic argument to be made for those crossings, or there isn't. I have no special insight (and here's a free hint: neither do Zussman or Mason!) but let's assume for the moment that the government knew and knows what it was/is doing in building all three.
If that's the case, what's important is that they serve their purpose, not that we build in a cost-recovery program. But the government built in that supposed cost-recovery anyway, and in doing so seriously distorted the transportation plans for the Fraser Valley. Both the Golden Ears and the Port Mann bridges and their respective tolls, are to this day avoided by many of the very people they were meant to serve, and the result has been not only a negligible cost recovery, but also more, not less, traffic gridlock on alternate routes.
That's a pretty poor return on significant investment!
In our very province, courtesy of the very same government, we have another case history which is a remarkable contrast to this rather obvious piece of mismanagement: when the BCLiberals decided to go all-in on the Winter Olympics, it soon became clear that they were going to have to undertake a very expensive upgrade of the road to Whistler. They bit the bullet, invoked yet another P3, and built it. 
It works; many, many people use it. The Olympics were deemed a success. Squamish, Whistler, and Pemberton have grown dramatically. Investors and developers have been emboldened. We ourselves quite often find ourselves on the Duffy Lake Road, in transit to the Interior, because the road to Whistler has ceased to be a problem.
Did you know that every time you drive that road the government pays a toll to the P3 on your behalf? Probably not; they haven't exactly been forthcoming on the subject!
Which suggests the question: if improved transportation is the object, just exactly how is a new bridge across the Fraser different from an expensive upgrade of the road to Squamish? Or serious upgrades of the Cariboo and John Hart highways? Or of the Trans-Canada through Yoho National Park?
I cannot see how it is, except that the government of the day, entirely for political reasons, thought they could convince people that no new taxes were needed for bridges into and out of the economic engine of the province, because the users would pay.
Thus the next question: just who are those users?
They are the people who either can no longer afford to live in Vancouver or need more space than Vancouver affords. They are, among others, the teachers, the paramedics, the firefighters, the policemen, the small-business owners, the workers, the... we could go on and on. They are, in short, the people who Vancouver cannot do without but can no longer house. For some reason our government thought it would be equitable to charge them not only the gas tax we all pay for maintaining our movement infrastructure, but also a surcharge in the form of tolls.
None of this is a persuasive argument for tolls; all of it suggests the NDP has the only tolling plan that is likely to actually prevent the Golden Ears and Port Mann bridges from becoming BC’s version of white elephants.
A dedicated “transportation tax” on all of us would be a more equitable and superior plan. It might even come to grips with the inequities of ferry fares and the need to build rapid transit.
I live in Campbell River, so cannot possibly benefit except through an improved BC economy. And maybe, in the future, a ferry-fare rollback.
But I can dream, can't I?