If you make a visit to Victoria this fall, you may find yourself with a little more elbow room at the tourist hot spots.
The editorial board of The Seattle Times is suggesting a tourism boycott of the quaint B.C. capital because of the city’s apparent refusal to stop dumping raw sewage into the water they share.
Decades of foot dragging and good-old-fashioned NIMBYism have slowed or halted construction of a wastewater treatment plant and the newspaper decided they’d had enough of Victoria’s crap. We can’t blame them.
And while we wouldn’t tell folks to stay away from Victoria, we will point out an equally odious double standard.
The feds have mandated that our new $700-million Lions Gate Wastewater Treatment Plant be online by 2020 but they haven’t committed to chipping in any money to pay for it.
Under Canada’s 1867 breed of federalism, Ottawa has almost all of the authority to collect taxes. And even though they collect just eight cents of every tax dollar, municipalities are typically asked to pay one-third of the cost for major infrastructure projects.
Victoria’s never-never plant, meanwhile, already enjoys a one-third funding commitment from the feds.
It seems in their barrage of pre-election spending, the Conservatives forgot the North Shore’s top infrastructure priority. If Victoria can’t get their game together in order to earn those federal dollars, we’ll gladly take them over here.
There are more than a dozen would-be MPs out knocking on doors for the next seven weeks. Don’t hesitate to ask them who should be paying for infrastructure.
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