Referendum: Hoist, Meet Petard

Here’s another angle.
If the referendum fails, the conclusion will presumably be that the voters of Metro Vancouver do not want to increase taxes to pay for transit.  But it won’t mean that they don’t want more transit – just that, whatever the proposal on the ballot, it  was unfair, wrong-headed, misinterpreted, insufficient – or whatever reason people use to justify a no vote.
The Province will then be an awkward position.  It may say, initially, that the vote means no new transit proposal is viable – but how viable a response is that?  How long could they tell an increasingly hostile electorate to put up with the overcrowding, the decay and the absence of any hope for improvements in the future? Essentially, the local MLAs would have to tell their constituents, ‘you’re screwed.’  And that’s not a good line in an election campaign.
No, they’d have to come up with something – and they’d have to pay for it.  All of it.
The capital costs of the Expo and Millennium Lines were covered by the Province; TransLink or its predecessors then paid for the operating expenses.  For the Canada and Evergreen Lines, however, the Province insisted that the region take on a proportion of the capital costs.
But post-referendum,  local leaders would be able to say, “Thanks to you, Province, we have no source of revenue for any new rapid transit, not even for increased operating costs.  You’ll now have to pay the whole shot – and forget about raising any local taxes.  The voters said no to that.”
So in the end, the Province may have to pay for TransLink’s new infrastructure out of general revenue, just as they do for highways – and it would have to be paid for by all the citizens of the province.