“They’re not going to find $400 million.”

Jeff Nagal’s got a must-read article in BC Local News.  It’s based on an interview with Translink honcho Tom Prendergast, with reactions from Surrey Mayor Diane Watts and clownish buffoon BC Trucking Association president Paul Landry.  Here’s Nagal’s lede:

Huge budget deficits for B.C. mean TransLink’s ambitious push to pour $450 million a year into transit expansion will almost certainly be shelved for at least the short term, CEO Tom Prendergast says.

That’s not exactly surprising anyone at this point, but still.  Crap.  More fun to read is Prendergast rolling his eyes at the province’s idiotic review dodge:

TransLink already underwent a detailed hunt for savings last year, overseen by its new professional board.

Prendergast does not believe TransLink is grossly inefficient given its mission, but says the province’s auditors are welcome to look for savings.

“They’re not going to find $400 million. They’re not going to find $40 million. But they’re going to find probably $2 or $3 million and we’ll make some changes,” he said.

 

Getting everything we want for free sure would be sweet.

This Peter Ladner post from a earlier in the summer has a great little factoid about Toronto:

John Howe, General Manager Investment Strategy and Projects for Metro Toronto’s Metrolinx, said there is solid public resistance in Toronto to all new transportation funding sources, even though congestion is the #1 problem in the region, with an 82-minute average commute.

“Sound familiar?”, Ladner asks.  Indeed it does.  Of course, there’s nothing odd about this at all.  What could be more common than wanting everything, and wanting it all for free?

This, by the way, is what’s so cynical about the province’s review dodge.  Saying that Translink wastes money by being inefficient or paying its executives too much is a way of suggesting that metro Vancouver could get the transit infrastructure we want without having to pay any extra money for it.  (If only Translink were more efficient! )  It’s a way for politicians like Campbell and Bond to direct Vancouverites’ attention away from difficult choices, instead of clarifying those choices for us and helping us to make them.  The review dodge really is politics at its most lazy and most cowardly.

 

The review dodge makes the throne speech.

Andrew MacLeod’s write-up of yesterday’s throne speech contained a nugget I didn’t see anywhere else.  Te review dodge made it into the throne speech!

It also made clear that the reviews of B.C. Ferries and Translink now underway are aimed at containing costs: “Public funding devoted to public transit and ferry services should not be used to subsidize unreasonably high compensation levels or administrative costs.”

Oh, good.  Reviewing Translink’s “high compensation and administrative costs” is definitely going to solve the problem of how pay for public transit in the Lower Mainland.  Definitely.

 

CTF president goes for the review dodge.

It’s been a while since we heard from the Canadian Taxpayer’s Federation, hasn’t it?  Fret not!  Here’s its president BC director, Maureen Bader, writing in the storied pages of the Georgia Straight.  She seem to think that because the airline industry shifted from a high-cost/high-quality equilibrium to a low-cost/low-quality equilibrium in the last decade, Translink is inefficient.  Wait.  What?  No, I don’t get it either.

Anyway, the real point is Bader’s whole-hog embrace of the review dodge:

TransLink wants another $450 million per year to continue expanding its expensive, heavily subsidized system. Taxpayers are expected to pay more and more for a very small, if any, improvement in ridership.

When the premier says TransLink needs to reduce costs before it gets more tax dollars, he is right. . . Instead of continuing to be a high cost supplier of transit services, TransLink needs to tender competitively to reduce both its costs and its fares to boost unsubsidized ridership. Until real reform occurs, it’s TransLink that needs to take a hike.

I bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?  First, Translink’s wasting too much money because it’s inefficient.  Second, it needs to become more efficient by–Can you guess?–privatizing its operations.  And Translink needs to make these changes before it gets the $450 million a year it needs to keep expanding service.

The striking thing is that Bader offers no analysis whatsoever to support her claim that Translink is grossly inefficient (besides, of course, her non-sequitur comparison to the airline industry).  You’d think that someone so sure that Translink is that inefficient would be able to say something about where exactly the inefficiencies are.  But the nice thing about being an ideologue is that you never need to look at an issue’s details before having an opinion about it.

 

Bond gets explicit about the review dodge.

From Jeff Nagel in the BC Local News, here’s transportation minister Shirley Bond:

Transportation minister Shirley Bond is not happy with TransLink’s call for Victoria to enable road pricing and tolling of existing bridges to help deliver a 45 per cent revenue increase for transit expansion over the next decade.

[. . .]

She accused TransLink of failing to look hard for ways to cut administration or other costs instead of seeking more money.

“That’s just unacceptable,” she said in an interview. “At a time when we’re facing a global recession, we believe very strongly that organizations need to look internally first.”

Anti-Keyensian gibberish aside, Translink’s plainly not currently wasting $450 million dollars every year.  Bond knows this.  She therefore also knows that looking “internally first” is not going to let Translink find a way to pay for the development the Lower Mainland needs over the coming decade.  Obviously I can’t see into her heart of hearts, but it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than that her statement’s meant to obscure, rather than clarify, the difficult choices that the Lower Mainland faces.

There’s also a meta-point here.  Jeff Nagel, who wrote-up Bond’s statement, chose not offer his readers any contrasting views.   He chose not to seek the opinion, say, of independent transportation economists about whether it’s possible for Translink to find $450 million a year by cutting administrative costs.  He therefore chose not to offer his readers any of the information they would need in order to form their own opinions about the merit of Bond’s statement.  Nagel’s piece isn’t even “he said”/”she said” straight reporting.  All he gives his readers is “she said.”  This is why, if the Liberals get away with the review dodge, it’ll be journalists who let them do it.

 

Will journalists let the review dodge work?

While I’m talking about McInnes’ article, let me make one more point.  Despite the fact that he was blasting the province with both barrels for trying to dodge Translink’s real funding issues, his Canwest headline writer chose to say something very different: “Review lets Liberals dodge transit decision.”

No.  If the Liberals get to dodge the Translink finding problem it won’t be because their review let them do it.  It will be because journalists covering transit issues let them get away with the dodge.  Those journalists are smart people.  They know exactly how Shirley Bond and Colin Hansen are trying to spin the Translink issue.  Ultimately, those journalists and their editors have to choose whether or not to get spun themselves, and whether or not to pass that spin on to their readers and viewers.

 

The Review Dodge.

Craig McInnes offers the first clear-eyed take on the big Translink review that I’ve seen:

The provincial government is calling on one of the oldest dodges in the book to cope with the bad news coming out of TransLink and BC Ferries.

Rather than face up to the tough choices that are going to be made to keep the entities set up by their own government operating in the black, Transportation Minister Shirley Bond and Finance Minister Colin Hansen have asked the comptroller-general to conduct a wide-ranging review of both organizations based on the notion that if only they were better managed, they could build new transit lines, float more boats and keep the buses running without any increases in fares, taxes or tolls.

Right.  It’s just make-believe to think that Translink’s funding problems are caused by its executives’ salaries and not, as Frances Bula’s reported, the fact that it gets less non-local–e.g., provincial–funding than other, comparable transit authorities.  Pretending otherwise isn’t solving any problems.

 

Translink kabuki.

Last night, I asked what the point of the province’s review of Translink was, since at least so far, it doesn’t look like the point is to help solve Translink’s funding problems.  Today, in a column that’s mostly beside-the-point populist crabbing about government salaries, Miro Cernetig offers a couple of answers.  First, taking the torches and pitchforks to Translink executives’ pay will be a nice bit of optics after the province’s harmonized sales tax raises everybody’s taxes.

But more ominously, Cernetig says,

Then there’s taking back control of TransLink. The agency has long viewed lobbying government for ever more money as part of its mandate. That was okay in the good times. But it’s not much fun for Premier Gordon Campbell to have his own agency telling the public his government won’t supply the dough for new buses and trains.

Ah. So maybe the review kabuki is stage-setting for the province’s eventual denial of Translink’s needed money.

If that’s right, it’s hard to overstate what a terrible idea it is.  When times are tough and gas is expensive, more people take public transit.  But Lower Mainland buses can only take so many more passengers.  (It’s hard to know how the Broadway B-Line could take any more people than it does at rush hour.)  It’s imperative to have good transit running for the people who want to take it, so they get into good habits that will last even when times get better and they could afford to drive.  And besides, spending money on useful public infrastructure is one of the best things a government can do to help turn a sluggish economy around.

 

Province’s review to identify real obstacle to green transportation: Translink’s org chart.

Well, what to make of Colin Hansen and Shirley Bond’s announcement this afternoon that the province will do a big review of Translink and the Ferries?  Let’s start with the questions we’d actually want answered by a big review:

• Is Translink going to get the $450 million a year it needs to stick to its present development plans for the next decade?
• Assuming it will get that $450 million a year, what level of government will the money come from?
• And related, will the $450 million a year come from taxes that nudge people towards taking public transit (like a vehicle levy or congestion pricing) or from taxes that don’t do anything to get people out of their cars (like property taxes)?

Will the review address these questions?  Presumably we’ll learn more later.  But right now, Bond makes it sound like they’re mostly going to be interested in reviewing Translink’s administrative structure.  So unless she thinks Translink loses $450 million a year overpaying its board, I’m going to say, no, the big review isn’t going to touch the important questions. Which raises the question, why the kabuki?  What’s the province’s angle here?

For his part, Hansen took the review’s announcment as an opportunity to showcase some stunningly contentless verbiage:

During these challenging economic times, we must ensure that services provided to ratepayers are done so in a way that is financially sustainable and provides maximum value for all British Columbians.

Hansen, you had me at “during these challenging economic times. . .”

 

Evergreen Line a go-go.

This unsigned op-ed from the Tri-City News has a nice little illustration of something Stephen Rees was talking about last week.  The province has nothing to lose in their stand-off with Lower Mainland mayors over money for transit.  Check out these grafs:

Transportation Minister Shirley Bond says Evergreen is a go but won’t hike the province’s share of the cost even though TransLink has serious money problems. TransLink is so cash poor, it’s going cap in hand to taxpayers and may not have enough cash for a bike rack, let alone its one-third share of the rapid transit line after the mayors’ council decides on a long-term funding plan.

So, according to the transportation minister, (a) the Evergreen Line is a go and (b) the province isn’t going to cover the funding shortfall.  What now?  In what sense is it “a go” if the money’s not there?

It’s pretty clear what’s happening here.  It costs the province exactly nothing to keep saying that the Evergreen Line’s a go.  That makes them look like they’re all for the project.  But then, if Translink and the mayors can’t get enough money together and the project doesn’t go anywhere, it looks like their fault, not the province’s.  After all, the province kept saying the Evergreen Line was a go!