We've Built a Province for Cars. The Bill Is Coming Due.

Drive down almost any arterial road in Metro Vancouver and you will see the same thing: a six-lane highway lined with single-storey buildings surrounded by parking lots. This is what we built. This is what we chose.

The housing crisis, the transit underfunding crisis, and the carbon emissions crisis are not three separate problems. They are one problem wearing three masks. We chose to build a province for cars, and now we are paying — in rent, in commuting time, in wildfire smoke, in the mental health of young people who cannot afford to stay in the place where they grew up.

This is not an accident. It is the accumulated result of thousands of zoning decisions, parking minimums, highway expansions, and transit deferrals made over sixty years by governments that responded to loud minorities of existing property owners rather than the silent majorities of future residents.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the solution is also singular: build more housing near transit, remove parking minimums, stop building highways, and let cities be cities. Every city that has done these things — Vienna, Amsterdam, Singapore, Tokyo — has solved these problems. None of them has solved them separately.

BC has a government that says it understands this. The question is whether it has the political courage to act at the scale the problem demands — and whether voters will reward it when they feel the short-term pain that genuine change always brings.