Paying for the city we want
There’s nothing like budget season to bring out the desires and needs of Toronto’s residents and businesses.
That can be everything from addressing potholes that threaten to engulf small cars to enhancing pedestrian safety and bike lanes.
But many of the city’s most pressing concerns — the need for more and better public transit, affordable housing, child care and community infrastructure, to name a few — still won’t be properly met when the city’s 2020 operating and capital budgets are done and dusted six weeks from now.
Instead, there will be fiery debates at city council, intense wrangling behind the scenes, and attempts that defy all logic and mathematics to make departments, programs and staff do more with less. That process starts on Friday. And it’s all too depressingly familiar.
Toronto has already had a decade of austerity budgets. The city is actually spending some $200 less per resident now than it did a decade ago, when inflation is factored in.
Yet city councillors continue to debate which programs are most worthy. They agonize over whether underfunded transit, social housing or child care most desperately needs a budget lift rather than contemplating the kind of property tax increases that, over time, might allow for all of the above.
There was a welcome departure from this tendency just last month when council overwhelmingly voted to increase taxes by eight per cent over the next six years to help pay the capital costs of much-needed affordable housing and transit expansion.
That was a good move, as we said when Mayor John Tory proposed it. But it’s not all that’s needed.
That levy to boost the “city building fund” should not amount to a one-off move when it comes to thinking about property taxes. It should be the start of a broader shift to understanding that we all need to pay for the kind of city we want to live in.
Unfortunately, Tory has already said he wants this year’s budget to once again keep the increase in the basic property tax at or below inflation.
That would mean the city will have more money to build new housing and transit, but not enough to properly run and maintain existing housing and transit, let alone meet its other growing needs.
There’s a real cost to this kind of underinvestment, as a new report by the non-profit group Social Planning Toronto makes clear.
“Years of doing more with less have left us with deepening challenges, widening inequities, and mounting crises in our communities,” says the report.
They are far from the first to point this out; it’s time council listened.
Social Planning urges the city to significantly raise revenues in the coming years. It suggests starting by increasing the municipal land transfer tax on luxury homes; adopting a vacant home tax, as Vancouver has done; and bringing back the vehicle registration tax axed by the Rob Ford administration in 2011.
None is a magic solution to the city’s budget problems. But they provide an opening to the kind of conversations that councillors should be having in the coming weeks.
Fixing the city’s revenue problem will take years of effort and steady increases to property taxes, as well as senior governments taking on more of the costs that don’t belong on the property tax base in the first place.
Even with the building fund levy increases, Toronto will still have some of the lowest property taxes in the region.
Toronto can’t hope to live up to our professed principles of being an inclusive city and a top global urban centre if it continues this trend of keeping both taxes and spending low.
Councillors have until Feb. 19, when they vote on this year’s budget, to see that.
Toronto’s building fund property tax levy shouldn’t be a one-off move