News flash: New referendum poll finds strong lead for No side.
When everyone wakes up after the votes are counted and the 0.5% transit tax has been voted down, if the polls are to be believed, who will notice?
Buses will still be crowded during rush hour. Traffic will still be gridlocked at choke points throughout the region. And buses will run infrequently at night or not at all.
Of course, No spokesperson Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation will be pleased and can update his LinkedIn account to apply for better jobs while Premier Christy Clark can check off an election campaign promise, a referendum on transportation financing that was doomed from the start.
Let's face it, as we know from the HST vote, it's hard to convince people to pay more taxes now for a future benefit but easy to tap into public anger about government spending, regardless of how out of context or inaccurate the information on which the anger is based.
TransLink is the straw man in this debate - also the scapegoat and the scourge - and to beat down this perceived demon, people would rather have crappy roads and transit well into the future.
It's crazy but in the aftermath of the transit referendum, it will be too late to reconsider.
That's because the only opportunity to prove that the Yes side might have been right won't come for another 10 or 20 years.
By then, many of the folks who are on different sides of this vote will be retired or dead, and their kids will be dealing with the fallout from referendum results.
These are today's college and high school students who will be saddled with the hefty retirement pensions for those who voted against the proposed sales tax hike. They're the ones who will be sitting in gridlock or waiting for buses and who will see good jobs disappear to places with better transportation infrastructure.
They might wonder, those taxpayers of tomorrow, whether an opportunity to do something better was lost along the way.
But that's OK, because we'll have given TransLink a smack on the nose and, for today at least, that seems to be the most important thing.
