CKNW Editorial
for April 20, 2000

Do you mind if I'm the grinch who stole Easter eggs from George Puil this morning? I'm going to throw some cold water on Mr Puil's idea to tax the motorist out of Vancouver.

Now for starters Mr Puil is in a conflict of interest you could drive all the cars in Vancouver through. As a Vancouver Councilor he sits as a member of the Greater Vancouver Regional District and by the other members, was elected Chairman. You will note that he was not elected by the citizens of Greater Vancouver to that post. His selection as Chair is two times removed from the people. Mr Puil is also the Chair of the Greater Vancouver Transit Authority. This body, responsible for transit in the GVRD so Mr Puil as Chair of the GVTA reports to Mr Puil who heads the GVRD who in turn reports to the Vancouver City Council of which Mr Puil is the senior Councilor and close political crony of the mayor, Philip Owen. Ted Hughes, where are you when we need you?

Now Mr Puil has it in mind to stop those of us who use the streets of Vancouver by imposing penalties. Never mind that we've paid for the roads and pay a King's ransom to park downtown, in the world according to Puil we all must take public transit. Mr Puil plans to discourage us in two main ways - he will impose an annual fine on those of us who drive cars in the GVRD of a minimum of $75 – I repeat minimum. This will, one expects, continue to rise as the traffic, forgive the pun, will bear. He then will triple the PST on parking lots and, just to make sure no one gets away with anything, will levy a charge against so-called free parking provided by malls and large stores.

Some questions. Why should the person who lives in Langley and works in Cloverdale have to pay this $75 minimum tax ... or lives in North Van and works in West Van? Why should very occasional users of Vancouver streets have to pay the same as daily computers? Because it's impractical to do it any other way? That's a great excuse ... by that theory everyone would pay the precise same dollar amount for income tax because it's too complicated to take into account how much people earn. What about the increased costs that will be passed on to consumers by levying this fine against so-called "free parking"? Does Mr Puil, with all these years behind him, not know that these lots aren't free but in fact the cost of them is paid by the consumer? Doesn't he know that every cost a corporation has is passed on?

Has Mr Puil examined the constitutionality of this? Can the impediment to free travel be imposed not because any crime is being committed but because Mr Puil believes that his social policy of public transit must be imposed by coercion?

But there is another basic question of fairness here. Not everyone can jump on Skytrain and go from home to work and back. Indeed, if you must go to work early - as my producers must, as stockbrokers must, as many shift workers must - from many of the outlying communities there isn't compatible public transit, period.

Now if we were like London, New York, or even Toronto where there is both fast, railed service plus light rapid transit there is fairness because virtually everyone has access to quick transit. This is not so in Greater Vancouver and will not be so for many, many years to come.

There is a cultural problem here. Ever since the days of Henry Ford the public has been in love with the automobile. It's part of the culture. It's a rite of passage to get a driver's licence. We've built not only our lives around the automobile but our economy. There is only one way social engineers like George Puil can wean us off the car and that's by providing a decent transit system that gets into every part of the GVRD, not just the favoured ones, mostly rewarded for voting NDP in 1996. As Bill Kinsella said in "A Field of Dreams", "build it and they will come".

People will do anything to avoid these imposts include starting to buy and lease their cars outside the GVRD boundaries. There is little limit to human ingenuity when it comes avoiding prohibitive taxes. Just for an example, when Singapore banned people driving into town alone, enterprising youths started renting themselves out as passengers. Now, don't get me wrong. I believe that we should both improve our automobiles so that they are less environmentally catastrophic and that some sort of user fee is inevitable. But Councilor Puil isn't trying to save the environment he's trying to encourage transit use by discouraging automobiles. And he's proposing to do this by a heavy use of the stick and a bare soupcon of carrot.

No, councilor, cum chairman, cum chairman again Puil ... you'll not have wide public acceptance on punitive measures against people without any regard for how often they drive into Vancouver or what sort of decent public transit is available.