If Vancouver Islanders were waiting for a surprise billion-dollar easter egg in this week’s provincial budget, they can forget it.
We might have a Victoria finance minister in Carole James, a Langford premier in John Horgan and a government whose survival depends on three Green MLAs from the south Island, but that didn’t translate into the announcement of Free Ferry Fridays or a high-speed chunnel linking the West Shore to the Inner Harbour.
Capital spending was limited to stuff we already knew about, including the 600-student expansion of Colwood’s three-year-old (!) Royal Bay Secondary by September of 2020, just over $200 million for student housing at the University of Victoria (to be done by 2024), $64 million for the new health sciences centre at Camosun College and $18 million for the Campbell River campus of North Island College. The announcement of 1,750 units of housing for Indigenous people across B.C. includes a 120-plus-unit project in the West Shore. There’s still $18-million worth of work left on the $85-million McKenzie interchange, which is due to be completed by late fall. The realignment of a tricky stretch of the highway to Tofino by Kennedy Lake is underway.
Noticeable by its absence, but not surprisingly so, was any Big Fix for the Malahat. Nor was there a response to the call from 13 capital region mayors to include commuter passenger trains on the E&N corridor in Tuesday’s budget. Nor should we expect action any time soon.
The Malahat and E&N are just parts of a larger south Island transportation plan — a “multi-modal” study, meaning they’re looking at everything from roads to rails and trails — that probably won’t be finished until next spring.
Once the study is done, the south Island’s transportation needs will have to be measured against those of the rest of B.C. (we sometimes forget that other parts of the province have their own Malahats that they consider just as urgent). Among the items on the ministry’s menu are more Trans-Canada Highway four-laning between Kamloops and Alberta (assuming Rachel “I’m going to build a wall and make B.C. pay for it” Notley doesn’t seal the border), upgrades in the Kicking Horse Canyon and the Massey Tunnel replacement (after Team Bridge and Team Tunnel settle their tug of war).
Once it has its shopping list in the fall of 2020, the ministry will have to compete with all the other ministries in selling the Treasury Board on its spending plans, a big hurdle to clear before money shows up in the budget in the spring of 2021.
In the meantime, work will continue piecemeal — four-laning and adding centre medians to a two-kilometre stretch of highway between Leigh Road and the West Shore Parkway, for example. A separate study to identify a detour route to use when the Malahat is closed is well under way, though cynics see it as a delaying tactic to avoid recognizing the inevitable: Once you dismiss all the already-dismissed pie-in-the-sky options such as double-decking the existing highway or building a gazillion-dollar bridge to the Saanich Peninsula, the only real alternative is pushing a road through neighbouring parkland or watershed.
None of the other ideas (widening the highway, building a rail link, adding ferries) address the real problem with the Malahat, which is that when the highway is closed, the 20,000 vehicles that travel it each day — the people who make the trip for work or weddings or medical appointments or whatever — have no alternative. The Island is cut in two. So, the province faces a hard choice between A) preserving parkland and B) opening a route that will let grandma make it to Victoria for chemotherapy.
The other big challenge is simply one of capacity. We’re pouring way more people into Victoria’s western approaches than the funnel can hold (or at least more than the funnel can hold when jammed with single-occupant cars belching exhaust while going nowhere). Hence the E&N corridor letter to Horgan and Transportation Minister Claire Trevena (another Islander), which is the sort of thing mayors come up with when they want another government to spend money.
When asked about the letter Tuesday, James deferred to Trevena: “It’s on the top of her desk.” Yes, and we can br pretty sure where it will go from there. Horgan said in May that a train is a non-starter. Trains are expensive and inflexible (and in case you forget, Victoria council chose not to include rail in the Johnson Street Bridge).
What is possible is the other alternative suggested in the mayors’ letter: more dedicated bus lanes. They’re already on Douglas Street — northbound from Fisgard to the Burnside bridge and southbound from Tolmie to Fisgard, with the stretch from the Burnside bridge on the drawing board. No reason they can’t run elsewhere — including the E&N corridor.
