Michael Den Tandt: Could there be a more ill-conceived boondoggle than NDP-proposed National Cycling Strategy?

The New Democratic Party’s dreams of seizing power have given way to an aisle-by-aisle slog to hang onto what’s left of the old furniture. It’s threadbare and lumpy but dang it, it’s what they’ve got to work with.

So it’s unsurprising that, a day after the Trudeau government set a national price on carbon emissions that, because of its incrementalism, is likely to stick (provincial griping notwithstanding), New Democrats would emerge from the reeds, bedecked in green camouflage leafage, with a proposed National Cycling Strategy.

On point is B.C. MP Gord Johns, with his private member’s bill, introduced Tuesday.

“Our country is facing many challenges including soaring healthcare and infrastructure costs, reducing GHG emissions, and traffic congestion,” declares a note on his website. “We need to do more to make __canada a cycling nation.”

Yes, that’s right. It’s not enough that any person in Canada can obtain a bicycle and pedal around at will, weather conditions and rules of the road permitting, and that millions of us do, all the time. It’s not enough that municipalities are free to paint bike lanes on their roadways, and that most have. It’s not enough that provincial legislatures are free to enact laws – as the Ontario government did last year, with Bill 31 – establishing rules that amount to a reiteration of the obvious: cyclists have a right to the road and must be given a wide, safe berth by drivers. No, no, no – there must be a National Strategy.

In the panoply of the woebegone, as New Democrats in the House of Commons lead their renewed assault on pragmatism from their newly patched-together roost on the socialist fringe, this is one for the ledger. Could there be a more curious, unlikely, wasteful and ill-conceived boondoggle, at this time in the life and history of Canada?

We can only wonder what would such a strategy would proclaim. That cycling is good for us and does not pollute, and therefore, like breathing and walking, we should do it habitually? Most Canadians are familiar with these truths, I would venture. But perhaps we’d benefit from having them further driven home, via an expensive public-relations campaign, funded with borrowed money – since Ottawa is currently operating in the red. 

I once rode my 10-speed to work daily through an entire winter. I cycled through snowstorms, rain, sleet, and bitter cold. I loved it. Curiously there was no National Cycling Strategy to spur me to greater effort.

One summer a few years ago I cycle-toured with a friend across south-central Ontario. We sped along the shoulders of highways and inched up steep dirt roads, into sleepy villages far from anywhere. It was a magnificent adventure. Ah, but how much more glorious might it have been, had we had a binder of federal cycling regulations to guide us?

Because of course, at the end of the day, more regulation is inevitable, should the federal government insert its snout.

Canada Bikes, an advocacy group that endorses Johns’ bill, produced a report in March, entitled “Towards a Bike-friendly Canada – a National Cycling Strategy Overview.”

The report envisions – wait for it – that a “federal government agency (such as Transport Canada) will lead and coordinate the development of such a strategy on behalf of the federal government with input and resources from relevant internal and external stakeholders including other federal government agencies (such as Health, Environment, Sport and Infrastructure) provinces, municipalities, NGOs, research institutions, industry groups, cycling advocates and community organizations.”

Never mind untangling the appalling word salad: it amounts to more rules.  How else would such an unholy agglomeration of bureaucracies measure progress?

Related

• The trouble with Montreal’s cycling boom: It’s getting dangerous — and riders are losing their lives
• Diplomat’s daughter, 23, cycling in Ottawa bike lane ‘right-hooked’ by turning truck and killed
• Joe O’Connor: Accidents happen in Toronto’s cycling wars. The tragedy is not everyone gets to walk away

It would be nothing new for nanny-staters to try. In 1935, the city of Toronto passed a bylaw requiring licences for the ownership and use of bicycles in the city. (Some faint northern echo of F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, perhaps?) The annual cost was 50 cents, the city’s website reports, and the fine for not having the required metal plate on one’s bicycle was $5.

Two decades later, in February of 1957, the law was scrapped, in an attempt to redress, among other things, “poor public relations between police officers and children.” Odd, that the architects neglected to consider this in 1935.

But this wasn’t the end of it: there were renewed efforts to impose licences in 1984, 1992 and 1996. In each case, common sense ultimately prevailed. Johns, I hasten to add, is not calling for bike licences. But from National Strategy to cycling education to permits is a series of short, easy hops.

So here’s a reminder to New Democrat MPs and, of course, the governing Liberals, without whose support Johns’ bill will meet an ignominious and well-deserved end: Jack Layton, when he served on Toronto council, rode his bike everywhere, in an era when it was still considered quirky to do so. It no longer is. It’s a matter of choice.

Leave it at that, why don’t you, and save us all a few bucks.