CKNW Editorial
for May 24, 2000

We are really going to have to get a grip in this country - a grip on our own affairs. There is a link, you see, between the tubed gravel pit on the Upper Pitt River and the privacy issues we talked about yesterday and the rape of Vancouver and its citizens pocketbooks by Translink. The link isthat the Pitt River situation shows what can happen when people get together and make their views known.

The privacy issue is a done deal but we can make it better by flooding the authorities with our letters, faxes and emails demanding our personal file information. It's utterly reprehensible what this government can do. We should also band together and refuse to participate in next year's census, be it the short form or the long form. If we do this together and refuse to fill these forms in, so that the courts would be utterly clogged if StatsCan tried to prosecute, we would get the message across and force some changes. It won't come unless a lot of us do it … but if we do, we'll strike a blow for freedom, something Canadians never do unless it's someone else's war.

The Translink debacle is the worst betrayal of democracy I've seen in a lifetime of observing this "soft dictatorship" in which we live. The entire scheme bears no relationship to the public will at all. We've been mesmerized by government in this province into thinking that as long as public meetings are held, the requirements of democracy are met. This not only is not so - in itself it acts as a denial of what it purports to offer, a public forum. What happens is that these meetings become dominated by private interest groups - and believe me I say thank God for them - but what it means in practice is that ordinary citizens are most reluctant to appear. There is only one expression of public opinion that counts and that is a referendum.

The referendum is more than just a vote - it is also a dagger pointed at the throat of the politician who knows that at the end of the day he must face the people. Think how easy all this is for George Puil. Elected to neither his chairmanship of the GVRD nor of Translink, he knows that he need only get his scheme past these two non elected bodies, take a little abuse in the media and it's all nice and done like a Christmas turkey. There is no accountability whatever. None of us elected Mr Puil to lead the GVRD nor Translink and he has assured us that we won't have the opportunity to examine his handiwork and accept it or reject it at the polls.

Mr Puil likens his position to that of a cabinet minister but that's deception, plain and simple. Cabinet Ministers are at the instant recall of the Premier - Puil can only be recalled by a majority of Translink and a majority of the GVRD on the insistence of the Vancouver City council who feel that they will not be held accountable for transit at the next election anyway because it had nothing to do with them. And they'll be right. While on the surface the cabinet minister analogy seems accurate, in the real world of politics it clearly is not.

It’s true that the Provincial government has thrust Skytrain at Translink but the GVRD accepted the bribe that went with it. It is still very much open to Mr Puil to make it clear that he proposes go to the people with the funding arrangements.

If the scheme is rejected by the people of course it will be messy. It will mean that the Province and GVRD will have to go back to the drawing board. But so what. Finding a solution will fall to the governments at all levels and they will simply have to go back to work. That exercise will surely mean that both the Province's and the federal government's share of gas tax revenues will have to be, in part at least, at the table.

But the point of today's editorial is this - the public can stop things if they band together. We stopped other done deals in the past – the Charlottetown Accord, the Kemano Completion Project and the Upper Pitt gravel project are three that come to mind.

On the transit issue I will, of course, present both sides but I don't pretend indifference. I'm for public participation and that means more than public hearings and public opinion polls - it means a referendum ...which I will support in every way I can.

There is only one reason why George Puil won’t have a referendum and it has nothing to do with the cost … which, set against the enormous funds involved is peanuts – he’s afraid he can’t sell the deal to the citizens of Greater Vancouver.

In the meantime other methods of protest will become apparent. One may be an action in the courts to test the proposition that ICBC, an insurance company, can be not only a tax collector, that’s merely a matter of convenience, but a tax enforcer for the province by withholding insurance policies from people who have paid their premiums but refuse to pay the $75 impost. It would also be interesting to know whether or not Translink can, through the back door, tax a free parking lot just in order to compel people to stay away from that lot.

Transit throughout British Columbia ought to be financed out of gas revenues and at the fare box – not through extortion which is the way the autocrat Mr Puil is proceeding.

Given the fertile imaginations in Greater Vancouver surely we can find ways to delay and ultimately defeat what is a lousy idea.