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LAUTENS: West Vancouver unfairly taxed beyond borders? Do a Wexit

West Vancouver town hall moans that 49 per cent of our large local taxes are collected for other governments. No problem. Let’s do a Wexit. Yes, let’s have a referendum.
Lautens

West Vancouver town hall moans that 49 per cent of our large local taxes are collected for other governments. No problem. Let’s do a Wexit.

Yes, let’s have a referendum. Let’s get out of the Greater Vancouver Regional District/Metro Vancouver club and go it alone.

If the British can do it – if they really will do it – West Van can. We couldn’t do it worse.

Mayor Michael Smith is consistent in nothing if not his complaint that WV gets the short end of the GVRD stick, especially for TransLink services.

The revolting Americans – some Canadians believe they haven’t stopped being revolting, especially the president – dumped chests of tea into Boston Harbour to defy the tea tax. Let’s each toss a symbolic tea bag into our harbour and proclaim our independence. Mayor Smith could impressively play George Washington, though lacking Washington’s famous wooden false teeth. On with Wexit!

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The above is a good idea, compared with the Orwellian “mobility pricing” of vehicle travel that has sneakily raised its hood mascot in Vancouver.

The social engineers and the privileged – not always such different people, as the salaries of the higher bureaucracy prove – have their hands all over this steering wheel.

As Orwell would drily observe: “All road mobility is equal, but some of it is more equal than others.”

The phrase is “progressive” PR, meant to numb thought and obscure its real intent. Originally it was called road pricing, a more candid phrase.

The bureaucrats have hired one Daniel Firth, who helped impose mobility pricing on London and Stockholm, with the impressive title of executive director of TransLink’s mobility pricing independent commission.

In plain language you will be taxed for the privilege of driving into downtown. And, as Firth told the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano, quite likely other congested areas, since Vancouver isn’t “mono-centric” like London and Stockholm but “poly-centric” with “a lot of downtowns or regional centres.”

In the British version, drivers who enter Central London’s Congestion Charge Zone currently pay the equivalent of $19.50 a day, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. According to Wikipedia, there is an Ultra Low Emission Discount – the bureaucratese reeks – for vehicles meeting Euro 5 emission standards, while all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids are free, zzz …

Here we’d have a new tax – just what we need in a country where, the Fraser Institute calculates, June 9 theoretically marked when we collectively finished paying taxes of all kinds for the year – on a host of ordinary people.

But mobility pricing would be great for the privileged. Georgia Street executives. Howe Street moguls. Politicians serving the people. High and not so high bureaucrats on “essential” errands. Media types nobly exercising free speech. Visiting dignitaries. And many more who have company travel allowances and dedicated parking spaces, i.e. don’t pay a personal nickel, and some for whom any extra tax is a trifle. For them – lighter traffic, wide-open Lions Gate Bridge, combing out the teeming masses who can go and teem elsewhere.

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Election leftovers: New Democrat Mehdi Russel made the fine gesture of giving a bouquet to his winning West Vancouver-Capilano opponent, Liberal Ralph Sultan. And at one all-candidates meeting Russel crossed the stage to convey a hard-to-hear question from the audience to the youthful Sultan, age 82.

At one point Sultan also referred to “my friend Michael” – Green candidate Michael Markwick, founder of WV’s Festival of Light. Three good men.

Former Lions Bay mayor Barbara Broughton assured me that not one attendee at the local all-candidates meeting would support the Squamish LNG plant. So incumbent Jordan Sturdy of the project-backing Liberals was done dinner? Not so. Sturdy won by about 3,500 votes.

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People daily pass the Department of Fisheries and Ocean’s Centre for Aqua-culture and Environmental Research facility in West Vancouver, without a clue about what goes on there. Last Saturday, parked cars lined Marine Drive as thousands flocked in to find out.

Such as: Using lice-loving perch supplied by the Vancouver Aquarium and juvenile Atlantic salmon supplied by Marine Harvest Canada, researcher Dr. Shannon Balfry found: “In our latest trial we had 40 salmon infected with a total of 370 adult lice, an average of nine per salmon. We introduced four little kelp perch who ate 364 lice in 11 days.” Right – all but six lice.

B.C.’s oft-slammed fish farms must rejoice. No one has slammed them more fiercely or longer than Rafe Mair, with the technical assistance of Alexandra Morton. Any comment, Rafe?

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Of course the pot crowd whose 4/20 rally messed up Sunset Beach sneer at paying a penny of the $245,000 cost. They’re confirmed law-breakers. Why would their conscience trouble them now?

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With sharp history and sly stiletto, Sun columnist Malcolm Parry asks: “Anyone recall a third-party review for Glen Clark’s fast ferries fiasco?”

rtlautens@gmail.com

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