According to THIS by Richard Zussman on the CBC web site, we can expect the Province of BC to match the $ 2.2B Federal contribution to transit expansion in the Metro Vancouver area. Official word at 9 a.m.
Isn’t April Fools’ day tomorrow? Or did I wake up in an alternate universe?
No matter. This is a good announcement. Glad to hear it.
But this does leave open the question as to where the other 20% will come from:
CBC Story: The municipalities, represented by the TransLink Mayors Council, will now be responsible for finding the additional 20 per cent to cover the estimated $5.5 billion it will cost for the two major projects.
A senior member of the provincial government says it is willing to work with the municipalities to figure out how to fund their share.
Following last week’s federal budget, de Jong said the province’s suggested option is for municipalities to use money from the developments along the transit lines to pay for the transit projects
We will see. But if true, it is indeed a good news story that will advance transit. Pardon the cynicism, but the Libs just had to steal the NDP’s policy on this. Will the NDP up the ante now?
Must be a May election coming up …
Likely NDP will have to up the anti now and spend even more money they don’t have. It is hallmark NDP ( or left leaning federal or Ontario Liberal ) policy to spend money that isn’t yet earned but entirely borrowed off future tax payers. Borrow, tax and spend. Any idiot can do that. That is good governance ?
Begs the bigger question: when will the extension to Jericho lands, UEL’s Block F or UBC be built, past Arbutus ?
If any party is wasting money it is the BC liberals with the Massey tunnel replacement. They are spending 100% on that white elephant.
Thomas, do you mean the extension to your house that there is also no money for?
Thomas, you accuse the NDP of spending money they don’t have (when they had already committed to 40% cost sharing) and are OK with the current provincial government committing to match the NDP promise? If the NDP doesn’t have it, neither do the Liberals.
An extension to UBC is likely awaiting UEL taxpayers, such as yourself, to agree to pay for it. Do you have the funds among that relatively small population?
UBC and UEL are provincial territories, not City of V but they are part of MetroVan ie covered by TransLink ! Property taxes on UBC properties ( but not UEL properties) are tied to City of V taxes, so a UBC condo assessed at $1M will pay the same taxes as one in Vancouver assessed at $1M. Likely those City of V property taxes are going up so the mayors can find the required 20% ( as of course expense cutting is not one of their strength ) for transit.
Note also the likely very large and likely quite dense Jericho development on the biggest land development in MetroVan is coming up soon with public hearings and proposals. At least we need this UBC line to go to Alma if the density of Block F in UEL ( also native land ) is any indication. Very poor regional planning to not extend Broadway line to Jericho / Alma in line with build progress, and then onto UBC. Very poor.
UEL is an unincorporated community. So your property taxes do not go to the City of Vancouver. So it is quite incredible that you continually push for the City to raise property taxes to pay for their share of transit, and furthermore to extend that line to UBC for your benefit. That is the definition of mooching.
Instead of advocating for other City taxpayers to pay for your desired subway, why don’t you lobby the provincial government (who receives your property taxes) to up their contribution to 60% for the extension of the line to UBC?
I would like to see a rapid transit line to UBC. I would also like to see UBC and UEL contribute to it. The ball is in their court much more than Vancouver’s.
When you use Block F development as a justification for transit investment, are you forgetting that the entire development has a target population of 2500 people, and a site density of 1.75 FSR? Hardly high density.
Yes UBC & UEL & FNs benefitting from land densification all ought to contribute. Yet, they are part of Metrovan via Electoral Area A and have a seat on the Mayor’s Council (Maria Harris currently). SInce Jericho land is co-owned federally and a JV it will complicate things, allowing much buck passing for years between city, MetroVan, UBC, UEL, FNs, province and feds .. but perhaps, just perhaps they actually get it done, TOGETHER ? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/its-time-for-anxious-and-willing-bc-government-to-put-up-the-transit-cash/article34424925/
UBC is the second highest employer concentration in Vancouver, after downtown. 10,000 employees. almost 15,000 (soon 20,000+ students live there), and 12,000 residents (soon 16,000+) like me. Massive provincial benefits to City of V and province if UBC line is built as shown by (the now 4 years old) KPMG study here: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/KPMG-UBC-Broadway-Corridor-2013-02-26.pdf
More on Electoral Area A here http://www.mariaharris.ca/ElectoralArea_About.shtml
So, Thomas, have you lobbied for increased property taxes at UBC/UEL and got a petition started to raise local property taxes to help fund the line?
Like an arranged marriage, we are tied via lease agreements to City of V taxes.
As you know, I am arguing hard and frequently for more efficient spending, as you know as there is a lot of waste and excessive pay & benefits to too many employees in the $5B+ annual MetroVan city budgets (and of course, at UBC, too).
I am OK with higher property taxes as a far better way to monetize (tough to trace, often dirty) foreign investments into local real estate if we lower income taxes. Like Texas.
“we are tied via lease agreements to City of V taxes.”
It doesn’t matter what your taxes are indexed to, it matters who you pay them to. You aren’t paying taxes to the City, but you want the City to raise taxes to give you a subway. You called this Mooching 101 elsewhere. Stop trying to deflect.
Extension to Jericho lands will come when the the developers pay for it in exchange for density which is worth over $200 a square foot. Without rapid transit the suitable zoning would be single family dwelling.
Yeah right. It is native land. Different rules apply.
The land is covered by municipal zoning and planning. It isn’t a reserve. This is like saying that the rules are different for your condo because it is German land, or that the rules are different for my condo because it is British land.
I would love to see the Libs and NDP fighting to provide increasingly greater funding for transit. The advantage with the NDP is that they already have a $4+ billion head start by not committing to the mega Massey debt machine. Four billion? No one with any construction experience will stick to anything less on such a huge project, especially when the P3 partner cannot get cheap financing.
Thomas Beyer, the NDP has the best fiscal record in Canada of any political party that has held office. Right of centre governments have a sorry record of spending increases combined with tax cuts resulting in huge deficits and running up the debt. Perhaps you remember Stephen Harper and the $160 billion added to the federal debt?
The right wing screams and screams their lies:
Tax cuts grow the economy and pay for themselves! No they don’t. This is a bastardization of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics, which points out that tax cuts must be funded by spending cuts. “Tax cuts without spending cuts are meaningless.” Right wing governments find shrinking government too politically unpopular, so they resort to beating up on the poor, who have no political voice and continually cutting taxes on the wealthy, at all stages of the economic cycle with anemic growth being the result.
The NDP are lousy economic and fiscal managers! Check out GDP growth in the last twenty years in B.C., top year of growth was under an NDP government at 4.9%. Would you like 4.9% economic growth Thomas? How could that be? Those tax and spend socialists! Pure fiction. Harper increased program spending 6% in a year. When the NDP took over from Social Credit in 1992, spending was increasing 12% a year – completely unsustainable. The last Conservative deficit under Mulroney in the nineties was a cool $45 billion, a rough guess is that it would be $60 billion + in today’s money, $60 billion! And you worry about an NDP government.
So many unaffordable tax cuts, the 1% are reckoned to be $39,000 ahead under the B.C. Liberals. That is what’s at stake here. Rolling back those tax cuts, which grew the economy today at a whopping 2.1% (rock and roll economy man) is going to be painful for the wealthy. But financing those tax cuts on the backs of the poor, by freezing welfare rates and cutting funding to social services in real terms, withholding billions in education funding and fighting all the way to a minutes long Supreme Court deliberation – pretty nasty people.
Fake news my friend. Higher taxes or even bigger government does not grow the economy. NDP is a mere wealth redistribution machine. A better name would be Robin Hood or Mooching 101 party. That is why so few vote for them, and currently only one province, Alberta, has them. The major winners there: already overpaid public sector workers, paid by everyone else. If NDP wins in May you will see the current #1 economic performing engine in Canada, BC, starting to sputter, as has happened in all provinces that did so.
Thomas, I have called you out on numerous occasions about your opinions regarding the fiscal management of NDP governments and have provided facts that prove you wrong. You have not yet provided any fact based evidence to back up your claims. Either desist in your ridiculous claims or provide some evidence to back them up.
@ Arno: A view on the federal NDP: http://theprovince.com/opinion/anthony-furey-ndp-champagne-socialists-are-ruining-their-party
“British Columbia’s economy tends to stagnate when Canada’s westernmost province indulges its left-leaning impulses at the ballot box, according to research recently compiled by the University of Calgary.
Relative to the rest of the country, B.C.’s economy weakened throughout the 1990s under previous NDP leadership, a trend only marginally improved under Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government, said Jack Mintz, director of the school of public policy at the school.” http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/b-c-economy-stagnates-under-ndp-rule-report
Generally speaking, NDP raises taxes on everyone, i.e. corporations, consumption, likely real estate, middle class and up, and thus takes and re-distributes. GDP and wage growth suffers, making everyone less well off. The NDP does not grow the pie (if at all), it merely takes the pie and re-distributes it from makers to takers ! Investments and mobile companies leave the province elsewhere. That was the case in the financially disastrous 1990s. The only winners typically are civil servants, lavished with big fat salary increases. Also see NDP Alberta that is doing just that at the moment. Not a model to emulate for BC. BC Liberals are certainly not perfect, and our taxes and public employee pay & benefit packages still far too high, but it is as good as it gets in socialist Canada. As such, cream of the crap.
Thomas, the first link is an opinion piece that adds nothing to the discussion. The second link is a bit dated but does show a few facts plus a whole lot of opinion. Your summary is simply more unsubstantiated opinion.
A much more detailed research piece, which I have provided in a previous post, was done by the Sauder School of Business at UBC and shows that NDP were more fiscally prudent than the Liberals.
http://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NDP-vs-Liberal-Performance.pdf
In any case, lower taxes and growth in GDP have not been a great success. Real wages have stagnated under governments of different political stripes over the last 40 years. Why is it that with increased wealth caused by automation, very little of this goes to the workers? Why is it that each household now needs two wage earners just to get by? Why is it that the very rich keep getting much richer and the average person is worse off? Why is it that under the Liberals, welfare rates have not increased in 10 years and the minimum wage is still very low? I will gladly take my chances with an NDP or a Green government than more of this society destroying policy foisted on us by the BC Liberals.
Thomas. Your quoted student,employment & resident statistics show that If UEL density was increased X3. there would be no need for skytrain. Most people could easily walk to work or school instead.
I don’t understand Thomas’ claims that increased housing at UBC proves a higher need for rapid transit. It is the opposite. To the extent that those residents live and work at UBC, there will be less commuter volume, and those who live at UBC and commute to Vancouver are going in the opposite direction to the rush hour flows, helping pay for buses that would otherwise be deadheading back to base.
Of course MORE people overall will means MORE trips as students, residents AND employees constantly leave the campus. No city is an island.
So you want to size infrastructure for the total number of trips, not regarding at all the distribution (peak hour vs off peak hour, and corresponding direction) of those trips? That sounds very wasteful.
Most students & workers living near campus do not constantly leave the area.Those who HAVE to live elsewhere are the ones CONSTANTLY leaving. Subsidizing affordable housing on the UEL would cost less than subsidizing mobility
Costing $300 a sq ft with 2 % financing NO subsidy needed. at all.
@Bob: kindly show me the $300/sq ft condo near UBC or anywhere on the west end. Most newly built ones are now over $1000/sq ft ! There is this illusion that more density in Vancouver creates affordable housing. That is just not the case. it just creates more housing.
More people = more traffic / trips. People do not just hole up at UBC. Many leave several times a week, and often arrive Monday am and leave Thu or Friday pm. Friends visit. They go to the pub or movie theatre downtown.
As stated above, UBCity is already a city of 65,000+ people in the day and will likely approach 80-90,000 in a decade or so. UBC is the second highest employer concentration in Vancouver, after downtown. 10,000 employees today plus almost 15,000 (soon 20,000+ students live there), and 12,000 residents (soon 16,000+) like me plus 40,000 day time students. Loads of new traffic with new highrises along Broadway and to connect offices in the healthcare field. This, and other provincial employment benefits to City of V and province if UBC line is built as shown by (the now 4 years old) KPMG study here: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/KPMG-UBC-Broadway-Corridor-2013-02-26.pdf
A total no-brainer funding itself from increased GST, PST, property taxes and employee deductions.
Dig, baby, dig !
Thomas (1) $300 sq ft would be CONSTRUCTION cost for affordable RENTAL housing. The land is already owned by UBC. (2) The daytime & overnight population should be balanced with much less subsidized commuting.(3) No need for a billion $ subway to get to the Pub or movie .(4) More people do not cause more traffic when they know that there is no parking. They will catch the bus instead.
Good.
I hope the cost hasn’t gone up too much in the mean time.
March 22, 2017. Statement from Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver.
” …Metro Mayors are ready to roll up our sleeves and work with the BC government to take advantage of this opportunity from the Trudeau government and match this funding with additional dollars to deliver crucial new projects like the Broadway Subway. …”
The provincial Liberal government of Christy Clark has done what was requested.
Even with the province bringing their contribution up to equalize with their tax draw from the Metro, this is in the context of the feds lowering theirs by 10% from previous statements, or 10% less than their share of the Metro tax revenue. The tax draw share, from senior to local, is roughly 50/40/10.
The transit funding share used to be 33/33/33. Last year with the federal Libs in power the funding share was 50/33/17. Now it’s 40/40/20 (if the announcement is as stated above). That means local taxpayers will be subsidizing the feds by 10% rather than the province by 7%. I suppose that can be counted as progress after subsiding senior governments by 23% for years.
I’d like to think PriceTags has played a role in this reversal of their entrenched position. The pro-transit and Massey/Christy Bridge boondoggle criticism in particular. Keep up the good work!
Author
Dark suspicions:
Gary Mason @garymasonglobe
The BC Lib gov’s transit announcement so cynical; why the games, the phony tough-talk with mayors when it knew it was going to do this?