Dan Fumano: Forum shows how 'baseline' has shifted on climate, transport, moderator says
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2019 01:41:58 +0000
With the federal election just under a month away, candidates from the four largest national parties were in Downtown Vancouver on Monday discussing the interconnected issues of transportation, land-use planning and economic development.
But it was perhaps unsurprising that the most heated moment of the event arose from a debate about housing affordability.
The forum featured Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal candidate for Vancouver-Granville, Andrew Saxton, Conservative candidate for North Vancouver, and the NDP’s Breen Ouellette and Greens’ Jesse Brown, both of whom are running in Vancouver Centre.
The event was co-hosted by Postmedia News and Moving in a Livable Region, a consortium of the Metro Vancouver Mayors Council, TransLink, and various boards of trade, academics and industry representatives. A crowd of 200 packed into the SFU Harbour Centre for the event, a stone’s-throw away from almost every conceivable mode of urban transport.
The entire forum can be viewed on The Vancouver Sun’s YouTube channel.
Shauna Sylvester, executive director of the SFU Centre for Dialogue, moderated the debate. Afterwards, she commented to The Sun on how the “baseline” position on certain issues across all four parties seemed to have shifted since four years ago, when she moderated a similar forum hosted by Moving in a Livable Region, on the eve of the last federal election.
“Comparing four years ago to today, there were some themes I had not expected to hear that were baseline. And those were the recognition of climate change as an issue that needed attention by the federal government, the recognition across all parties of the role in electrification of the transportation system, the need to reduce GHGs (greenhouse gases) in vehicle traffic, to increase funding and investment in transportation and green technologies — that was a given,” said Sylvester, who ran for Vancouver mayor last year and finished third. “The last federal election, those themes were not baseline themes. Of course we heard differences today from each of the parties in how they would approach each of them, but that as a baseline is new.”
The four candidates seemed to agree, broadly, about the need to reduce Canadians’ dependence on gas-powered vehicles, to reduce both congestion and our carbon footprint.
“We need to encourage people to get out of their cars … which means we have to invest in public transportation,” Saxton said, a sentiment generally echoed by his counterparts from rival parties.
Transportation is, in many ways, a topic that combines many issues. It’s an economic issue, because major infrastructure projects are massive job creators. It’s a climate issue, because transportation accounts for almost a quarter of Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
Transportation is also closely linked to affordability, which is, of course, top-of-mind for many Metro voters.
In planning circles, transportation is viewed as an increasingly important piece of the affordability puzzle. Metro’s Housing and Transportation Cost Burden Study in 2015 marked the first time the regional authority combined transportation costs with housing costs, describing it as “a new way of looking at housing affordability in the region.”
But when a member of the audience asked a question Monday about the links between transportation and affordability, Saxton didn’t directly address transportation, but instead raised the subject of the mortgage stress test. The stress test, introduced last year by the federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, set a new bar for Canadians looking to take out a mortgage. The measure was meant to ensure Canadians aren’t taking on more debt than they could handle should interest rates rise or their situation change.
However, the stress test “has made housing less-affordable,” Saxton told the crowd Monday, adding: “in fact, for many people, it’s made housing unattainable, especially for young people.”
A Conservative government, Saxton said, would be committed to “reworking” the stress test, and to “make housing more affordable by increasing the amortization period to 30 years.”
The Tories’ commitment to loosen the stress test and increase the amortization period had been unveiled earlier Monday by party Leader Andrew Scheer, with some experts telling The Canadian Press that the plan could lead to more debt and higher property prices.
It was Noormohamed’s turn to speak next, and he responded to Saxton, saying: “What the Conservatives are proposing here is actually very, very dangerous.”
Making it easier for people to borrow larger amounts isn’t the solution to affordability, Noormohamed said, and could potentially have wider risks, raising the example of the 2008 financial crisis, in which many borrowers found themselves overextended.
Noormohamed highlighted the Liberal government’s national housing strategy, launched last year, with its focus on supporting production of different forms of housing such as affordable rentals and co-ops. Affordability, he said, isn’t about the ability to “buy the most expensive house you can.”
The two candidates tried to speak over each other, while Sylvester stepped in to moderate.
On the subject of how to pay for transportation investments, Ouellette said the NDP’s plan was to end subsidies for oil-and-gas companies, increase taxes on the highest tax brackets and “aggressively” cracking down on tax avoidance by the “super-rich,” those earning more than $20 million a year and hiding income offshore.
Ouellette cited a Parliamentary Budget Office report from earlier this year estimating Canadian companies’ use of offshore financial centres could represent $25 billion in lost federal revenue last year alone.
Meanwhile, Brown said the Greens want to allocate one per cent of the GST to municipal infrastructure on a continuing basis, which could provide consistent reliable funding for transportation.
The federal election is Oct. 21.