A bad week for Clarkai??i??s fading B.C. Liberals
Another Canadian politico, deep in the doodoo
the sad fact is SkyTrain, the Canada Line and now the the Evergreen SkyTrain Line are big contributors to TransLink’s financial woes. building more SkyTrain only exacerbates the situation.
by Gary Mason – Globe & Mail
It should have been so simple and straightforward ai??i?? a premier announcing two by-elections.
And yet by the time B.C. Premier Christy Clark finished a news conference called on Thursday to reveal the date for by-elections to fill vacancies in the ridings of Port Moody-Coquitlam and Chilliwack-Hope, she had angered Metro Vancouver mayors, mistakenly thrown into doubt the near-term future of a planned rapid transit extension and made her partyai??i??s already uphill odds of winning either vote even more remote.
Today, many B.C. Liberals are wondering if they should just wave the white flag now ai??i?? not just in the two by-elections but the general election that will be called in a yearai??i??s time. It does not look good for the governing Liberals. Hopes that the sunny populist stylings of Ms. Clark might temporarily dazzle an electorate that seems ready to throw her party out of office have long begun to fade.
The by-election call was another example of why.
In the news conference, the Premier was asked about $30-million in funding that Metro Vancouver mayors want to complete a raft of transit-related initiatives. The mayors had said that unless the province passed legislation allowing them to raise that money through means such as a vehicle levy, they would have to raise property taxes
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The line was built to service a scifipec volume of traffic that has been projected for the line.The traffic volume projections have been critized as being optimistic, so I expect that the stations will be able to handle the volumes.The stations are comparable to a lot of the existing stations on the older two lines. SkyTrain has never had a lot of amenities at the stations.Do you feel it was a bad idea to build it as a P3? The Canada Line was finished significantly early and was on budget, one of the few LRTs in North America in the last 20 years to achieve either.