Vancouver Candidate Wants to Put the Public Back in Public Transit

In Vancouver, a mental-health worker named Meena Wong is staking her long-shot mayoral campaign on policies designed to lower the cost of living, such as taxing vacant luxury condos to subsidize affordable housing. Recently, she proposed scrapping tickets on the city’s public transit in favor of charging all adult residents a dollar a day. “Residents will save $140 a month,” says Wong, who is running under the banner of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE. “That’s a lot!”

Over the course of a year, those savings would add up to C$1,680, or about $1,500. Today fewer than a quarter of Vancouver residents buy transit passes, which cost as much as C$170 a month. COPE estimates that if all 450,000 working-age Vancouverites paid up, the metro transit authority, TransLink, would make about C$160 million annually, about C$10 million more than it collected last year. (TransLink declined to comment, citing the Nov. 15 election.) COPE says residents who don’t want a “V-Pass” can opt out of paying the annual fee.