In a word, British Columbia’s best and brightest are confused.
Specifically, they’re confused why polls suggest British Columbians are poised to overwhelmingly vote down a proposed hike to the provincial sales tax, the ballots of which are being mailed out this week. If passed, the .5% rate increase will generate $250 million a year in new revenue to support an ambitious plan to improve bus and train service in the greater Vancouver region, something TransLink, the public transportation authority, insists is badly needed.
If the term “establishment” has any worthwhile definition at all, it’s fair to say that the entire British Columbia establishment supports the tax hike. The ruling Liberal government and the opposition NDP support it. The vast majority of mayors support it. The police officers and firefighters support it. The universities support it. The unions support it. The chamber of commerce supports it. Even the BC golf association is on board.
The pro-tax forces have spent untold millions bombarding British Columbians with pro-tax billboards, flyers, websites, TV commercials, radio spots, newspaper ads, and grinning young people standing on street corners in bright green t-shirts. But no matter how loudly or often they make their case, by a two-to-one margin, the voters ain’t biting.
At root is a massive split in perception.
British Columbia’s elite, in general, have a worldview which places government as the central force of society. They’re likely to work directly for the government, or in industries that are favorably subsidized or regulated by it. Many of their most passionate moral causes are tied to initiatives they believe only government can adquately address: global warming, inequality, discrimination.
The political opinions of the elite tend to center around which party can do government best, as opposed to what government should be doing. They’re likely to support Mayor Robertson because they feel he’s an obedient marionette of an intelligent bureaucracy and equally likely to loathe Premier Clark because they think she’s an erratic rube (though many share her apprehensions about the NDP). Since they have endless faith in government’s capacity to spend money properly, when revenues run dry their instinct is to ask taxpayers for more.
The non-elite, in contrast, are likely to live lives in which government is a more distant presence — quite literally, in the case of suburban residents who dwell far from the power centers of downtown Vancouver. Their understanding of the state is more transactional, with an assumption that what one pays through fees and taxes should correlate with the value of services received. Most do not use public transportation and view the enormous salaries and expense accounts of those who run the transportation authority as evidence government is not starved for cash.
These competing visions are broad generalizations, of course. Doubtless more than a few British Columbians will be voting with the sort of cognitive dissonance common to the boomer generation, in which government is expected to do everything yet cost nothing. But by and large the split in the tax fight is unmistakably rooted in class, and a deep disagreement over how much trust should be afforded to the powerful.
BC’s elite clearly do not have an effective strategy for communicating with their lessers. Lecturing them in the style that works on other elites — citing European case studies to illustrate why TransLink is actually very elegant and cost-efficient, for instance — has flopped, as have increasingly condescending editorials insisting that voting for the tax hike will make you “richer, healthier and happier,” as an urban planning consultant wrote in the National Post last week.
At times, it’s been hard to avoid schadenfreude at the sheer incompetence of the “Yes” campaign, whose profound lack of self-awareness often has a sort of Thurston Howell III quality — how many more chamber of commerce endorsements do you people need? Yet there’s real danger the public’s eagerness to vote down the transportation tax, just as they voted down the equally elite-backed Harmonized Sales Tax in 2011, will ultimately expedite further overclass distrust in democracy. Many in that class are already blaming Premier Clark for allowing the vote to occur in the first place, while others are furious that many of TransLink’s most damaging spending scandals — particularly the ongoing Compass Card boondoggle — were the result of excessive meddling in government business by elected politicians.
Because government has been allowed to become the central force of BC society, with a mandate that has ballooned to encompass not just causes practical or functional, but moral, the long-term project of those who take government’s divine mission most seriously will be to minimize input opportunities for those who don’t.