What do the province's Green, Liberal, Conservative and NDP parties have in mind when it comes to local government issues? That's what Metro Vancouver wanted to know, so it went and found out.
Metro Vancouver set up the website Local Government Matters as a platform to share what B.C.'s political parties had to say about new relationships, municipal financing, protecting the environment, affordable housing, public transit and regional planning.
The purpose of the site is to give citizens an opportunity to know the issues and how the parties plan on tackling them, wrote Metro Vancouver's chair on the site's homepage.
"We believe that to create and maintain a vibrant and sustainable region, all levels of government - local, provincial and federal - must work together to address the problems that we all face in an increasingly complex world," wrote Greg Moore, Metro Vancouver Board of Directors chair. "Whether its funding major infrastructure projects, or protecting the environment, or providing more affordable housing, we need to ensure that the provincial government has local issues as a priority."
All six topics have several questions that each party responded to, such as "what will you do to improve local governments' long-term financial capacity, and how would you provide more flexible and permanent means to finance the range of services and infrastructure that local governments now provide?"
The parties' responses can be browsed either by issue or party.
To read each party's response, visit www.localgovernmentmatters.ca.
