Tim Louis tells Peter Ladner what’s best for Vancouver

On June 8, Vancouver councillor Peter Ladner defeated Mayor Sam Sullivan for the Non-Partisan Association mayoral nomination.

In light of the upset, the Straight asked former Vancouver city councilor Tim Louis a few questions about where Ladner could take Vancouver on issues like housing and sustainability. Louis answered with a few words of advice for the two-term councillor. Here is the Q and A:

Georgia Straight: What could a Ladner mayorship mean for the state of housing in Vancouver?

Tim Louis: I don’t think it would mean very much. The NPA position will not change on the question of housing. Ladner’s voting record on housing was a photocopy of Sullivan’s voting record on housing. The NPA believe in the market, they believe that the market solves all problems, and they are not going to do what needs to be done. What needs to be done is to earmark a certain percentage of the interest of profits that the Property Endowment Fund generates every year and earmark that percentage of the profits to the immediate construction of social housing in the city of Vancouver. The fact of the matter is that the Property Endowment Fund produces millions and millions of dollars every year in interest; half of that interest is, typically, put into the city’s general revenue (its operating account) to assist with its annual operating expenses. But the other half”¦goes back into the Property Endowment Fund; in other words, the milk from the cow being fed back to the cow to make the cow bigger. Well the cow is now over one billion dollars in size. I think it is time that we begin to take that other half of the interest and use it to address an emergency, and that emergency is the need for social housing.

GS: How could Ladner shape Vancouver as a sustainable city?

Louis: I’ll tell you what he could do, but he won’t do it. He could, number one, create a U-Pass for the entire city of Vancouver. He could do that by having the city of Vancouver cut a cheque once a year to TransLink in an amount equivalent to what they collect from all their fare boxes within the city of Vancouver, minus 10 percent; they write a cheque to TransLink for 90 percent of what TransLink currently collects in fare-box revenue per annum in the city of Vancouver. Write that cheque once a year: ninety percent because TransLink spends 10 cents of every transit dollar collected collecting [those same] transit dollars. Its one of the most inefficient tax-collection systems in Canada. The friction cost is 10 percent. Property-tax collection, the incremental increase is zero percent. So if we collected the money needed to pay TransLink on property taxes, it wouldn’t cost us anything in friction cost; the cost of collecting the money would be nil. That would then increase each property owner’s property taxes by an amount that would be sufficient to issue, to everybody in the city of Vancouver, a U-Pass. And because everybody in the city [would] have a U-Pass, you wouldn’t need to issue U-Passes; you simply would remove all the fare boxes from all the buses in the city of Vancouver. That would improve transit efficiency, it would reduce boarding time, it would massively increase ridership (as the university U-Pass has already demonstrated), and it would significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are being produced in Vancouver every year. It would then set in motion a sequence of events; as bus riders are going up and private-motor-vehicle usage went down, we could begin to reclaim part of our streets for much more useful purposes: larger lot sizes, community gardens, communal space. We could even turn parts of Vancouver, with neighborhood approval, into car-free areas. Now, with regards to the city’s fleet of vehicles, we need to move to a zero-carbon-emitting fleet of vehicles.

GS: How might an initiative like Project Civil City change under Ladner’s leadership?

Louis: It’s not going to change. The purpose of Project Civil City was to create work for an unemployed [B.C.] Liberal cabinet minister, whose name is Geoff Plant. It has not and will not create a better city. The solution to panhandling is to deal with the root cause of the problem, which is poverty, and you deal with that by more social housing but also making clear to the province that income-assistance rates are criminally low and that aggressive panhandling is not the real crime here; the real crime here is the criminally low income-assistance rate. So the real criminal is not the aggressive panhandler but the premier of the province, who decided to freeze income-assistance rates many years ago, and they have been frozen in time. Project Civil City is not going to bring about a more civil city.