Government – Canzi

Fear Mongering and Self-Interest on Electoral Reform

Like many Canadians, I was sorely disappointed this week when Justin Trudeau made it clear that he would break his oft-repeated promise that the 2015 election would be the last one held using the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system.

It has long bothered me that under FPTP a party with as little as 38% of the vote can win more than 50% of the seats in the House of Commons, because when a party has more than 50% of the seats, as Trudeau’s party currently does, it has 100% of the power. That strikes me as undemocratic, but even more it strikes me as unhealthy. By limiting diversity of opinion in debates, and by removing checks and balances on power, I think FPTP gives us ill-conceived and poorly-thought-out policies. And then a different party wins 100% of the power with 38% or 40% or 44% of the vote, and the scythe swings in the other direction for a few years. And that strikes me as the exact opposite of stability.

I was skeptical of Trudeau’s claim this week that electoral reform was being shelved because there is no consensus on the whether to make a change, let alone how. Four of the five parties on the committee studying the issue recommended a version of Proportional Representation (PR), where the percentage of seats a party gets is closely related to the percentage of votes it gets. As Fair Vote Canada, a group that lobbies for PR noted this week, 88% of the witnesses who appeared before the committee, and 87% of the public at its consultations, expressed a preference for PR. Only Trudeau’s party, the Liberal Party, was not swayed by the testimony.

And I was offended by the fear mongering Trudeau engaged in when he suggested that it would be “irresponsible” to proceed with electoral reform because it would harm “Canada’s stability” and might lead to “an augmentation of extremist voices in th(e) House.” Canada is a country of laws. It is as illegal to counsel someone else to break the laws of this country as it is to break the laws yourself. And the laws apply to everyone, including members of political parties and even religious groups. So I wonder just what form of “extremist” political party Trudeau is referring to.

Fear-mongering language about “radical or extreme” parties was also used in the MyDemocracy.ca survey the Trudeau government sprang on Canadians in December, shortly after the committee released its report in favour of PR.

The survey, in case your attention was elsewhere, like Christmas or Hannukah or New Year’s celebrations, was widely criticized and even ridiculed. Responding to the survey was voluntary and there was no obvious way to prevent extremely keen individuals from completing it more than once, so the sample wouldn’t necessarily be representative of society at large.

Then there was the issue of its vague language. The terms First-Past-the-Post and Proportional Representation were never mentioned in the survey; nor was preferential balloting (a.k.a. ranked balloting), Trudeau’s preferred option, an option that would likely make Trudeau’s party the governing party in perpetuity. Instead, there were vague questions about individuals’ values.

Yesterday I had a close look at the survey results to see if they justified Trudeau’s back-pedalling. And indeed, just as his new Minister of Economic Institutions, Karina Gould, said on Radio One yesterday, most Canadians who responded to the survey are satisfied with the way our democracy currently works: 17% said they were very satisfied and 50% said they were somewhat satisfied.

Then things got confusing.

In question after question, a clear majority of survey respondents indicated that they favoured a form of government in which several parties have to work together to make decisions and where no one party can act on its own. When given a choice between “A government where one party governs and can make decisions on its own OR a government where several parties have to collectively agree before a decision is made,” for example, 70% chose the latter. But this exactly not the kind of democracy we currently have.

Yes, there is debate in the House of Commons, but Members of Parliament are usually required to vote how their party leadership tells them if they want their political careers to continue. Yes, there are committees, but their membership usually reflects the distribution of the seats in the House, so again a party with more than 50% of the seats in the House gets more than 50% of the seats around the committee room table, even if they only got 38% of the vote. There is no way to ensure that diverse opinions are actually considered and that the governing party doesn’t blithely ignore opinions it doesn’t share.

I walk away from this experience with the nagging suspicion that a lot of Canadians don’t really understand how their government currently works, and the sense that a lot more work needs to be done to educate them about that and the alternatives to it before there can be a rational debate on this issue.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my belief that the percentage of seats a party gets should be closely related to the percentage of votes it gets and that government by coalitions of parties will increase the diversity of knowledge and experience involved and improve the quality of the decisions made. And for that I will continue to fight.

Residential Parking Permits, a Forgotten Revenue Tool

Several years will pass before the City can collect tolls from users of the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway; that’s assuming the province even gives the City permission to do so. Unless the City taps into other revenue sources in interim, that could mean several more years of budget cuts, like the 2.6% across-the-board cuts planned for 2017.

Currently, residents can purchase permits to park on residential streets when they do not have access to on-site parking where they live. While prices vary, more than 90% of the permits are sold for $15 per month. If the City increased the prices to something closer to the value of the goods and services “parking” actually represents, it could be an important source of revenue. And, unlike road tolls, the City could access the revenues quickly because neither new infrastructure nor provincial permission would be needed.

In August, condo experts Urbanation reported that the average price of a new condo in the City of Toronto was about $7,100 per square metre. An on-street parking spot is approximately 13.75 square metres, so a person would have to purchase a residential parking permit for more than 500 years at the current price before they’d actually “bought” their spot.

Of course, condos and parking spots are not perfect equivalents, but it’s important to remember that a parking spot is not just a rectangle of asphalt. It is also the street lights overhead and the storm sewers underneath. It is snow plowing in winter, street sweeping in summer and parking enforcement year-round. It is a bundle of goods and services that costs the City a lot of money to provide.

In fact, according to the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, the annualized costs of constructing and maintaining an on-street parking spot are about $1,341. Even then, that is in an area where land costs $1,200,000 per acre, whereas land costs several times more than that on a typical residential street in the west end, so the annualized costs of providing an on-street parking spot there are likely much more than $1,341. Yet the overwhelming majority of residential parking permit holders in Toronto currently pay less than $200 per year.

All residents benefit from street lighting, storm sewers, snow plowing and street sweeping, of course. That is why all residents pay property taxes to support these things, and why it would be unfair to expect residential parking permit fees to cover all of the related costs. But it is primarily motor vehicle owners that benefit from the parking spot itself because you can’t purchase a permit to store any other kind of private property on it.

If the City increased the price for permits to park on residential streets, it could have an impact on how people get around. If the price was increased to $141.50 per month, say, which is the current price of a Metropass, the appeal of transit, cycling, walking and ride-sharing would increase. Some residents might jettison their cars altogether and rely on taxis, Uber, AutoShare, Car to Go, Zip Car and rental agencies for the occasional trip the other modes can’t serve well. Society would benefit from reduced traffic congestion, reduced emissions and noise, and increased physical activity…

Those residents who really need to have a personal automobile, but are unwilling to pay a higher price for an on-street parking permit, could move to a part of the city where driveways are common and garages are big. As they move outward, they might be replaced by people who don’t own cars, perhaps even by people with low incomes who would benefit from living downtown where distances are shorter and transit, cycling and walking are more viable options.

Current permit holders would not be able to avoid increased fees by parking in their garages or parking pads instead of on the streets. “There are people who use their garages for storage,” admits Vince Loffredi, Supervisor of the City’s Residential Parking Permit Program, “But there aren’t that many because most people prefer to park on their own property rather than on the street.” They would park on-site if they could, which is why most would continue to pay the fees even if they were increased.

Fees from residential parking permits would be no substitute for road tolls, but they could be an important part of a holistic solution to the City’s financial challenges. If the City increased the prices, the program would bring in many times more than the $13.5 million it does at present, money that could be used to expand transit, improve social housing and address other pressing needs instead of cutting back.

All the City has to do is raise the prices.

Written in December 2016.

Licensing Bikes: A Solution in Search of a Problem

A motion requesting a staff report on licensing bicycles is on the agenda of the September 27 meeting of the City’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee (PWIC). The motion was referred to the PWIC after being introduced at a Council meeting by Councillor Stephen Holyday (Ward 3 Etobicoke Centre) in July.

The City has considered and rejected the idea of licensing cyclists several times. There is even a page on the City’s website recounting this history, including the reasons why previous proposals were rejected. However, this initiative, unlike previous ones, is about licensing bicycles, not bicyclists.

In conversation, Councillor Holyday explained that his motion was motivated primarily by a desire to gather better data for planning purposes. The Councillor expressed concern that projections in the City’s cycling plan were based on Census data. He wants to know where people are actually riding and seems skeptical of the short-term counts of cyclists currently used in planning.

The Councillor envisions a licensing program in which Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags would be affixed to licensed bicycles. He believes this would result in the collection of higher-quality data, which would result in better planning.

RFID tags would be seen as an invasion of privacy by some. Currently, when cars, trucks and bicycles are counted, they are counted anonymously. Councillor Holyday sees each RFID tag being associated with a specific bicycle, however, which would mean that bicycles would thereafter be identified as well as counted. Unless motor vehicles, pedestrians and other road users were also required to carry RFID tags, one would be able to make the case that bicycles were being singled-out.

And RFID may not even be an effective way to gather useful data. GPS-based smartphone apps, like the Toronto Cycling App, can track a user’s route turn-for-turn; however an RFID reader can only count and identify tagged items when they are nearby. The Councillor opposes tagging children’s bicycles, so trips on children’s bikes wouldn’t be counted, nor would trips made on untagged bicycles from other cities. On the other hand, the pneumatic tubes currently being used to count vehicles are able to count all of these trips.

Concerns about RFID aside, Councillor Holyday’s proposal may be based on a false premise: that short-term count data is inaccurate. Data from short-term counts are usually extrapolated based on 24/7 counts done in comparable locations elsewhere. In this way, projections are made to reflect the fact that the number of cyclists will be lower in cold months than in warm ones, for example. Experts insist the errors are small if the count is done right.

Regardless, counts of where people currently cycle aren’t enough when planning where to make improvements in the future. Planners also use neighbourhood-level data about population density from the Census, and trip length data from other sources, to estimate potential interest in cycling. Where data indicates an area with a large population taking a lot of short trips, infrastructure improvements may increase the number of those trips made by bicycle.

In addition to improving data collection, Councillor Holyday’s proposed bicycle licensing program is intended to generate revenue for infrastructure maintenance and expansion.

“Even though we all pay taxes, and we all contribute,” the Councillor argued, a bike lane is “exclusively enjoyed by cyclists,” so it is not unreasonable to expect cyclists to pay some of the costs of providing it. When asked if he’d support charging tolls on motorists using the Gardiner and DVP, which are for the exclusive use of motor vehicles, however, the Councillor said he would not. He does not support any new revenue tools, bicycle licensing fees being the one apparent exception.

Finally, while the Councillor said his proposal is not about changing behaviour, he expressed hope that licensing bicycles would result in improved compliance with traffic laws. He suggested that if cyclists purchased their licenses through partner organizations, such as cycling clubs, members would have a chance to talk to them about safe cycling and press literature into their palms. Comprehensive, Ontario-centric resources are already available free-of-charge online.

On Tuesday the PWIC can approve the motion and direct staff to prepare a report on the potential of a bicycle licensing system, it can refer the motion back to the full Council for further debate, or it can defer it altogether.

Written in September 2016.