When it’s time to stand up and be counted on gridlock, it all depends on where you’re sitting.
Sitting in traffic? Good chance you’d do anything, maybe even pay something, to get moving again.
Sitting on the opposition benches at Queen’s Park? Chances are you’d see an opportunity to profit from public resistance to new taxes — guaranteeing we get nowhere.
Sitting on the board of Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency? Good chance you’d be cheering its
latest plan for $2 billion in new taxes to bankroll an ambitious blueprint for future construction.
Sitting in the Liberal cabinet? Chances are the Metrolinx recommendations read like a road map to political suicide. An election on new transit taxes could be the end of the road for Premier Kathleen Wynne, yet she is determined to spend political capital on raising new revenues.
She will soon have her chance. After five years of hemming and hawing and hewing to the political winds, Metrolinx has chosen its poisons:
A new 1 per cent sales tax.
A 5-cent per litre fuel tax.
A non-residential parking levy.
And optional tolls for drivers-in-a-hurry who want to share in car pool lanes.
On Monday, Metrolinx rolled them out with a lofty tone that belied the rough ride ahead. It was an impressive (if illusory) manifestation of elite consensus by its board, which counts three bankers among its rarefied membership.
In fairness, the directors also include people with well honed political antennae, from former Tory treasurer Janet Ecker to ex-NDP cabinet minister Frances Lankin. Yet both have limited influence within their erstwhile constituencies.
Moments after Ecker proclaimed her public support for new dedicated transit revenues, Tory MPP Frank Klees waded in to tell reporters his party would wage an election campaign to protect people from paying a penny more. Citing government waste, he repeated the Tory shibboleth that the best way to build commuter trains is to stop the gravy train.
Lankin, too, made an impassioned plea from the podium for progress on public transit, pointing to a new “mobility tax credit” to insulate low-income people from an HST increase. But New Democrats are intent on waging class struggle against optional toll lanes, denouncing them as “Lexus lanes.”
The opposition is faithfully (if mischievously) tapping into polls showing public antipathy to new taxes. Polls don’t lie, but people do — to themselves. Drivers may be in denial, but deep down we all know it’s madness to pay so high a price for traffic jams (Metrolinx calculates the opportunity cost at $1,600 per household in wasted time and money.)
Politicians who parrot the anti-tax mantra without proposing a way out are being intellectually dishonest. They may also get caught out if public opinion shifts and overtakes them.
Anyone who grapples with gridlock, at street level or in the legislature, understands viscerally that there is no running away from it. Two decades ago, people could stick their heads in the asphalt without worrying about traffic flow. Today, with an average commuting time of 82 minutes, no one can close their eyes to congestion. Nor can anyone pretend it won’t get exponentially worse in 10 or 20 years if we do nothing now.
The Metrolinx report is brave, but not all that bold. It is notably spineless on the question of road tolls, which are conspicuously absent from its recommendations (apart from optional tolls on existing car pool lanes.) They were too toxic for Metrolinx to stomach.
Even the proposed gas tax is a modest 5 cents per litre (about 3.8 per cent, based on current prices.) It should be higher — Vancouver charges 17 cents — but the report opted to play it safe with a less visible hit at the pump.
The big tax in the Big Move (as the overall Metrolinx plan is called) is the proposed HST increase. People don’t like consumption taxes. Stephen Harper won an election by cutting the GST. But his opportunistic 2006 campaign promise has opened up tax room for the Ontario government to take one point back, by boosting the HST to 14 per cent.
Will it fly? B.C. voted down an HST in 2011. Yet Ontario re-elected the Liberals that same year (ignoring combined PC-NDP attacks.) And last month, Manitoba’s NDP government boosted its sales tax to fund needed infrastructure. Necessity is the mother of tax hikes.
Wynne wants to move rapidly on rapid transit. But she also knows voters are not yet ready for a major tax increase. At this point, the premier faces an unpalatable choice between traffic gridlock and political hemlock.
That’s why she is appointing a more representative panel (fewer bankers, please) to study the Metrolinx report and forge a broader consensus. The Liberal government is buying time in hopes of getting more buy-in from riders, drivers and voters.
Over time, the debate will keep coming back to the same question: From where you’re sitting — in traffic, on a subway platform or atop a campaign podium — what would you do to get us out of this jam? No taxes is no answer at all.
http://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2013/05/28/choose_your_political_poison_to_unlock_gridlock_co...
