Mayor Plante pleads for funding sources
The city of Montreal is gasping for oxygen as it tries to meet needs ranging from programs for the homeless to crumbling infrastructure, Mayor Valérie Plante said Wednesday.
Quebec’s municipalities are united in saying that the Quebec government needs to kick in more revenue so they can deal with needs from housing to mobility, Plante said at a meeting of the city’s executive committee.
“We need oxygen to ensure that we don’t have to depend on property taxes alone to meet all of Montrealers’ needs,” the mayor said in a passionate plea for a new fiscal pact between municipalities and the province.
“I’m talking about social programs, but I could also talk to you about our parks, I could talk to you about our roads and other infrastructure.
“We need oxygen, and I will be talking about this subject a lot in the coming months,” she said.
On Thursday, Plante will meet other mayors in Quebec’s union of municipalities to work out a common position seeking a new fiscal pact with Quebec.
She also vowed to raise the issue with Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Andrée Laforest at a meeting scheduled in the coming days.
It is not realistic to expect Montreal taxpayers to foot the bill for dealing with societal needs like homelessness, the affordable housing shortage, aging sewers and crumbling roads dating from the 1960s, Plante said later to journalists.
“Seventy per cent of my revenues come from property taxes. That is a lot for citizens, and it it’s a lot for merchants and business entrepreneurs,” she said.
“Not only Montreal … but all the municipalities, (are saying), ‘Please, give us some new resources, so we can better take care of our cities,’ ” she said.
Those pressing needs come on top of the need for major investment in public transit, she said, like the Pink Line métro extension she campaigned on in 2017.
Alexandre Cusson, the mayor of Drummondville and president of the Union des municipalités du Québec (UMQ), has said a new fiscal pact will be the dominant issue for municipalities in 2019.
“Municipal taxation has reached its limits,” Cusson wrote in an opinion piece last week, noting that municipal taxes in Quebec are the highest in Canada and among the highest in the 36 members countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
That results in problems like constant tax increases and urban sprawl, he noted.
Plante said it is urgent for cities to find new revenue sources.
The current fiscal pact, signed in 2015, expires at the end of 2019, but the UMQ is hoping for a deal by next September.
Last year, former Premier Philippe Couillard promised municipalities a one-per-cent share of provincial sales taxes — a proposal that has received the backing of other parties in the National Assembly.
In 2016, Quebec passed a bill empowering the province to impose working conditions on municipal workers, which municipalities had demanded to curb rising labour costs. mscott@postmedia.com