It's time to end the conceit that Metro Vancouver is a clean, green model of sustainable urban development. The livable region is over. Remember the world-renowned 1996 plan, hammered into a handful of memorable words under Gordon Campbell's leadership at Metro Vancouver?
- Protect the green zone;
- Build complete communities;
- Achieve a compact metropolitan region; and
- Increase transportation choice.
In 2011, that plan morphed into the Regional Growth Strategy, approved by every municipality in the region but now twisting in the wind:
- Create a compact urban area;
- Support a sustainable economy;
- Protect the environment and respond to climate change impacts;
- Develop complete communities; and
- Support sustainable transportation choice.
Look at what's happening.
Protect the green zone? The province has lurched into a stealth attack on the agricultural land reserve in the name of economic development, involving at least one minister who wants to take away the arm's-length decision-making powers of the Agricultural Land Commission. .
Support a sustainable economy, respond to climate change impacts, protect the environment? Our regional economy is poised to be reconfigured around environmentally risky exports of greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels from across North America: up to eight million tonnes a year of U.S. coal to serve MacQuarrie Infrastructure Partners' Fraser Surrey docks, and big increases of oilsands bitumen from Alberta flowing through a new Kinder Morgan pipeline into Burrard Inlet tankers.
To enable MacQuarrie's coal shipments (which will produce 25 new jobs in Metro Vancouver, about as many as one new restaurant), B.C. taxpayers are committed, without a referendum, to build a new 10-lane $3 billion-plus bridge for cars and trucks and removing the Massey Tunnel for freighters. Health-care costs from increased air pollution, car accidents and sedentary suburban living are not part of the calculation.
Develop complete communities and a compact urban area? The recently completed $3 billion Port Mann bridge and Highway 1 expansion has enabled temporary relief from traffic congestion, while encouraging congestion-causing sprawl farther up the Fraser Valley. The new Massey Bridge and $658 million South Perimeter Highway are stimulating similar development pressure on low-lying areas of Delta and Richmond, where the bill for dyke improvements to protect against rising sea levels starts at $9.5 billion.
Support sustainable transportation choice? A sustainable economy depends on frequent, reliable transit service to areas where jobs and homes are concentrated. In spite of that, all transit improvements have been thrown under the proverbial bus with the province's commitment to a dysfunctional, doomed November 2014 referendum on new transit funding disliked by all the mayors and many Liberal MLAs (off the record). Contrary to populist belief, TransLink has been phenomenally successful in providing new transportation choices up to now. While the radio talk shows chirp about TransLink directors' fees, the percentage of trips that have switched to transit in Metro Vancouver since 2006 is unmatched anywhere in North America. Metro Vancouver's per-capita transit trips are unmatched by any city our size in North America. Of all cities in North America, we're third highest (after New York and Toronto) for per-capita transit use. The province and TransLink's goal is that half of all regional trips will be by walking, transit or cycling by 2041. It's highly unlikely that's going to happen. There is no Plan B.
Welcome to our new future.
How did it get to be so different from what we want? •
