My email inbox has been flooded with about 100 spending announcements from the B.C. government the past few days, as money is being shovelled out of the door as the fiscal year draws to a close later this week.
But a particular big ticket spending item has yet to arrive. For a while, it looked like it never would, but I expect to see it any day now.
I’m referring, of course, to the question of whether the province will step up to the plate and finally agree to increase its share of funding to build badly needed transit lines in Metro Vancouver: the Surrey light rail lines and the Broadway subway line in Vancouver.
Last week’s federal budget cleared the path forward to finally getting shovels in the ground on these and other projects. The feds are officially putting more than $2 billion (over a decade or so) on the table, and this has put the squeeze on Victoria to sweeten its offer.
There’s nothing like big pots of federal money to get other levels of government moving. The B.C. government can hardly let this kind of cash contribution to disappear, and so I’m betting it will now revisit its long-held position that it would fund only one-third the costs of any project, with the feds and the municipal governments also contributing a third each.
But Ottawa has upped its ante to 40 per cent and it can reasonably be assumed the provincial government will soon follow suit, thus reducing the municipal level share by a significant amount (still more than $1 billion however).
The province can hardly squawk about this. It spends a gargantuan amount of money on infrastructure – about $4 billion annually on roads, highways, schools and hospitals – every year anyway, so being pressured to fork another $700 million or so (over a long period of time) hardly seems unreasonable.
And it’s a political no-brainer to finally end this game of chicken that has been going on for years. The B.C. Liberal government has forced the region’s mayors to hold a doomed-from-the-start referendum to raise their share of the transit funding, and a stalemate has been reached that serves absolutely no one.
The provincial election is on the horizon, so what better time to court thousands of traffic-choked commuters with the enticing allure of shorter travel times?
Big transit projects such as the Broadway subway line and Surrey light rail lines are also massive job creation vehicles, a fact that fits nicely in Premier Christy Clark’s political wheelhouse. Her re-election mantra is essentially “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and I can’t believe she’s going to give up a chance for a campaign stop at a potential Surrey construction site, with her trusty hard hat affixed firmly on her head as she beams for the television news cameras.
And even though Vancouver is not where the B.C. Liberals have their political soul, there are two ridings there that be winnable on May 9th for the party, should it give the green light to that subway line on the slightly more politically favourable west side of the city.
As well, the NDP has already promised that if it is elected on May 9th it will increase its transit funding share to 40 per cent, so a move by Clark to do the same right now may neutralize the NDP’s position, which if left unmatched will be a popular one.
The region’s mayors have made the reasonable argument that its tax base on which to draw upon for funding is nowhere near as great as the provincial government’s, and so the province should pay a higher share.
It’s an argument that has so far fallen on deaf ears in Victoria, as the province has responded it doesn’t want to set a precedent. But the political upside of changing its position would appear to be more alluring to a government hoping to be reelected fairly soon.
Now that the Trudeau government has made the first move in a very clear way, the path is clear for the B.C. government to make the next one. My email inbox is awaiting the news.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global B.C.
