Mayor’s budget priorities under fire
Re Reserve funds key part of plan to balance
city’s books, Jan. 25 When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Sadly Toronto’s revenue tool box includes only property taxes and user/licensing fees. This makes it an oddity among the world’s great cities in not getting stable revenue from an income tax.
Everyone knows that property taxes are unfair because they have no relation to your ability to pay. In Toronto, land accounts for the bulk of a home’s value so property taxes bear little relationship to the structure families occupy. User and licensing fees are just as bad, discriminating against lower earners.
Why is Toronto stuck with a centuriesold funding model long abandoned by other industrial nations? Why does Queen’s Park believe that it is acceptable to evict people from their homes by steady increases to property taxes or deny them services through unaffordable fees? Rather than hammering residents at every turn, why not share the provincial income tax to fund municipal services based on ability to pay? This would address the three major problems we face — income inequality, crumbling infrastructure and disappearing services — without adding the bureaucracy of another tax.
Toronto doesn’t have the tools it needs but there is nothing preventing the province from fixing this problem. Gary Dale, Scarborough Mayor John Tory continues shaving the truth. No property tax increase above 2 per cent — excluding the half-per-cent to begin paying for Scarborough’s onestop subway. That’s the best public transportation deal for Toronto’s northeast, he says. Except it isn’t and already exceeds $3 billion and counting.
He asked every city department to cut 2.6 per cent of their budget, but skipped police services, the single-largest component. Now he says Toronto’s solidwaste employees earn about what private companies pay their workers. Yes, if pensions and benefits aren’t counted in.
But hey, “there’s no moral dimension to it,” he says. Bernard Katz, Toronto