In the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko makes the point to his young protégé Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, that the road to acceptance with many rich people lies in contributing money to zoos. There are many among the wealthy, Gekko said, who love animals far more than people.
A similar story is being played out in our municipal political landscape today. There are far too many in the political class who love policies — however false and contrived — far more than they care for the welfare of the people. We write here today of the hijacking of our political agendas by the big “green” lies.
What prompted us to sound an alarm on this issue has been the recent spate of news about the return of tramways. Enough is enough!
Enough of the attack on cars and drivers. This is not the 1960s and 1970s when pollution blackened our skies and soiled our water. Of course reduction in the use of the internal combustion engine would be a positive thing. As much to cut reliance on foreign oil as to lessen the amount of emissions. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Society moves by locomotion. We live in a time when many people hold down two jobs. Driving a car is a necessity, not a luxury. People who get things done need to move around. Expansion of public transport is also crucial, but let’s cut the nonsense and stop the demonization.
We have lived through the reduction of parking spaces for bike paths; further reduction for the bixis; and even more discouragement of drivers with the egregious increases in parking rates. All in the name of going “green”. It is all a lie. It is being done to raise municipal revenues by politicians who can’t get the basics of municipal governance right and seek to make political capital by appeasing a small, vocal minority of anti-industrial activists. They daily commit a tort on the body politic.
Now with the seeming inevitability of a return of the tramway, some hard truths need to be exposed. This summer is the fiftieth anniversary of the burning of the last of Montreal’s tramways. They were slow, caused traffic jams and in our harsh winters it took death defying stunts to run into the street to get into them or around them. That’s why they were replaced with buses, and in the sixties with one of the world’s most envied subway systems. The latter is the public transport we need expanded. At a cost of a billion dollars we don’t need two tramways lines. That money could give us another badly needed subway line.
Then why aren’t politicians of both major parties speaking these truths? Because the vocal greens vote more than others! But that still doesn’t make them right. If the municipal politicians were honest they would admit that all their efforts against the automobile have actually caused more emissions. They have caused traffic jams and stalls with cars spewing out gases at a rate far higher than before. We idle longer. The search for parking spaces is endless. But they continue to sell the lie that the bike paths, and the bixis and the meter increases are all for the sake of the environment. It defies reason.
Another big lie they sell is that municipal decisions can actually affect emissions. Every major study, including the last presented in Montreal two years ago by Dr. Wendell Cox, has demonstrated that no combination of rate hikes and parking reduction has resulted in any significant decrease in car use in major cities. Even London, England’s famous inner-city tax has lowered car use by 12 percent only in the five block area around the Bank of England. That tax, introduced by former Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone, is under attack by current Mayor Boris Johnson.
Furthermore, the Cox study demonstrated that municipalities have control over an infrastructure that accounts for only 2 percent of emissions. Municipal policies have no discernable effect on emissions whatever.
If we want to reduce use of the internal combustion engine there is only one effective tool. Federal governments in Ottawa and Washington must make the hybrid and electric cars the standards and provide tax credits to consumers to make those cars affordable. Affordable at $20,000 not $40,000.
Finally, in a city like Montreal where one-third of our households live below the poverty line and two-thirds of our working men and women are working poor, the attack on the automobile threatens the very lifeblood of our economy. From people not being able to shop or see a movie because of the fear of parking tickets; to businesspeople abandoning the city core because it’s just to hard to get around; to workers not being able to be productive because getting around the “green” way is just too tiring.
Can anyone imagine the fatigue that a worker goes through if they follow the plan of the “green” politicos? Park your car as close to public transit as possible. Get out of your car. Take a bus or subway. Get out of the bus or subway. And if it’s still too far to your job, well…BIXI! It’s exhausting just pondering the possibility!
Our politicians better get real very fast or they won’t have a city to govern. We need an expanded subway system. We need an expanded expressway through the Turcot. And we need more city core parking. Montreal is sixty percent of Quebec’s GDP and our downtown is two-thirds of Montreal’s GDP. Time to wake up. Let’s stop the big green lies!
