Faced with a rash of media attention about the fact that the long rumoured Evergreen Line seems likely to never be built Translink’s board has decided that the solution to the problem is a two cent a litre tax dedicated to the Evergreen line.

I fully support the idea of taxing greenhouse gas causing transportation methods to pay for transit. Not this tax though.

I’ve only recently bought a car again, after going without for not quite a year. I didn’t drive much for the six months before that which means I’ve largely missed out on paying $1.30 or more for gas. It’s not fun, but it’s the price of the beast and the beast has its charms.

You only pay for gas if you drive, and I still don’t drive much, and my new car is a Toyota Echo which is better on gas in the city than my old car was on the highway, so it’s not like I’m spending a lot of money. I ride a bike most places and take transit to work when I have too.

So a two cent a litre gas tax isn’t going to have much of an effect on me. It might increase my cost by a couple of dollars a month at most.

Here’s the problem.

There’s already a levy on gas that goes directly to Translink. Translink asking for another one to build evergreen is like you walking into your boss’ office and saying you need a raise because you’ve spent your entire salary. At the end of the day, even if you get more money you’re probably just going to spend it.

I could live with an increase in the Translink levy if it weren’t for the fact that there’s also the carbon tax. This means that there’s already two environmental taxes that could be used to pay for this thing.There’s two taxes that should be used to for this thing: building long term mass transit is exactly the sort of thing the carbon tax should be used for. Long term investment in public transit is the only way to get people who use their cars every day to stop.

It’s not the fact that I’m unwilling to pay two cents per litre, it’s the fact that municipal, provincial and federal levels of government have—yet again—decided that instead of prioritizing or trying to invest carefully wisely, they’re just going to raise money with another new tax.

Adding a third tax just doesn’t make sense. The fact that the third tax is being proposed by Translink—an unelected board board—is even worse. It literally amounts to taxation without representation, and that’s the sort of thing that used to cause revolutions.

it probably won’t in this case. The various mayors will shuffle the blame around and it won’t have any impact on their reelection chances. Vancouver will continue to function but the real question is: do we actually believe this two cent a litre tax will get the Evergreen line built? The other two didn’t help.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Posted by skooter at 6:54 PM This entry is filed under Vancouver.
This entry is tagged: Evergreen Line, Gregor Robertson, Public Transit, Translink, Vancouver, Vision Vancouver