The bottomless money pit
Municipal leaders representing Ontario’s towns and cities opened their annual meeting in Ottawa Monday, with predictable news: an urgent need for $6 billion to close a yawning infrastructure gap that is undermining economic growth and threatening the safety of our citizens.
The money is the difference between how much the province’s 444 municipalities can afford to spend, and how much is needed to fix crumbling roads, bridges, sewers and watermains. Municipal leaders want to know what the provincial government is willing to offer. This is not new. Every year, municipal governments sing the same song, pleading for help from higher levels of government who offer what is, in the larger scheme of things, no more than a Band-Aid.
There is no doubt any longer that Ontario’s infrastructure needs are huge. According to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the gap in the province as a whole is $60 billion, and municipalities will need $6 billion each year over the next decade to build new roads, bridges and sewers and repair what’s salvageable. We don’t need anyone to tell us the problems are real. In Ottawa and around the province, we see them in the congestion that often turns our arterial roads into parking lots during the rush-hour commutes, the watermains that break in the middle of roads, holes that appear on highways and swallow cars, as well as sewer and stormwater flowing into our rivers. The federal and provincial governments are certainly very much aware of the problem and doing the best they can. According to Premier Kathleen Wynne, Ontario plans to spend $13 billion this year on “strategic infrastructure” while the federal government is committed to spending $6 billion across the country. Ontario has also launched a $100-million fund geared specifically toward improving infrastructure in small rural and northern municipalities. While welcome, all that funding is nowhere near what is needed. So what do we do?
We need to move beyond the annual rite of hand-wringing over the issue. By now, it is very clear that neither the Ontario government (of any colour) nor the federal government can afford to put more money into infrastructure than it has already committed. The fact of the matter is that the municipal property tax base is not deep enough to carry the additional load of paying for infrastructure and it bears repeating that new ways must be found to fund all the new roads, waste water and other projects towns and cities desperately need. At different times in the past, proposals have been made on everything from giving municipalities more money from income tax, to special taxing powers for cites and new levies to pay for new infrastructure. These and other suggestions did not go beyond the task forces that made them, but now is the time to reexamine these in a serious way. Wynne herself has floated ideas about congestion fees or levies, and AMO leaders gathered in Ottawa this week can do themselves and all of us a big favour if they turn a serious attention to discussing alternatives and finding other solutions.
This is not a call to raise taxes. But money for new infrastructure has to come from somewhere, and the federal and provincial governments are not bottomless pits for funds. So we have to use our collective ingenuity to find other sources, or change the taxation system to make it more rational and less of a political game. That does not mean letting governments off the hook for infrastructure spending. But they just can’t do it all alone, and if help comes in the form of user fees, toll roads or new taxing powers for cities, let us have a serious discussion and figure a way out. Let us hope that at the next AMO meeting, we will have some bright new ideas to discuss — not just hand-wringing and a call for more money.