Editor, The News:
Christy Clark’s Liberals must love provincial Conservative leader John Cummins.
When he speaks, he sounds more than a bit goofy to anyone listening.
Until he opened his mouth, observers were actually considering him and his band of merry oldsters a serious threat to Ms. Clark’s Liberals by splitting the right-of center vote.
That was then, this is now.
Yesterday’s man has loudly proclaimed that Lower Mainland municipalities could easily offset the need for a two-cents-per-litre gas tax to fund the Evergreen transit line to Coquitlam by cutting back their own budgets.
That approach deserves about as much serious consideration as breaking open your kiddy’s piggybank to pay for the much-needed rapid transit line.
Cummins’ approach completely overlooks the main objection to funding proposals that will see outlying municipalities paying huge sums for a system that provides them with little or no benefit.
Undoubtedly, portions of the capital required to construct the long overdue line will be paid by people who will not benefit directly, but to require the entire cost to be spread evenly over all Lower Mainland municipalities is unacceptable and totally unfair.
Cummins has, by his own hand, set back the cause of provincial Conservatism another decade.
Sandy Macdougall
Maple Ridge
