Toronto ‘rain tax’ raises hackles of Trump Jr.

Any time Donald Trump Jr. weighs in on Toronto municipal politics, you can guess that the debate has become detached from reality.

Such is the case of the alleged “rain tax” that people far and wide are warning that Toronto city hall is set to impose. You have Don Jr. weighing in, the Times of India wondering about it, Sky News Australia warning “Don’t go to Toronto” because of it.

What the ever-loving flood is this all about?

Well, I’ll tell you what it’s not about: it’s not about taxing rain, nor even taxing things that cause rain. It’s not even new, or unique to Toronto.

The idea is a stormwater charge. And it aims to deal with a specific problem.

When it rains, water that isn’t absorbed into the ground flows into storm sewers, and then into the lake. When there are particularly bad storms, those storm drains overflow, and people’s basements get flooded, underpasses turn into lakes, streets are filled with water and generally lots of bad things happen. Sometimes, the combined sewer system overflows, causing sanitary sewage — the stuff we flush down our toilets — to mix into the storm runoff system flowing untreated into the lake. It’s a crappy problem.

It’s caused not just by the amount of rain that falls, but by the amount that is not absorbed into the ground, and therefore needs to enter the storm sewers. Your lawn absorbs rain. Your driveway does not. The more we pave the city, the more water is going to wind up in the drains.

The city has been working on the stormwater flooding problems for years in a bunch of ways, and is in the midst of long-term moves to address them. We have to pay for all those moves.

Right now, the way we pay is through our water bills, which are based on the amount of water we consume. Which is mostly unrelated to how much we contribute to this problem.

An apartment building consumes lots of water because hundreds of people might live there, drinking and cooking and doing laundry and taking showers every day. A parking lot occupying twice the land area consumes almost no water at all. Yet the parking lot is forcing much more water into the storm drains.

The proposal here is that property owners — of homes as well as industrial and commercial businesses — would see reduced water consumption rates that would continue to cover the infrastructure to carry the water to their property and the sanitary sewers to deal with it afterwards. But to pay for the stormwater system, there would be a new, separate charge, that would be based on the “hard surface” area on a property — the paved areas, the roof and so on.

According to the estimates in the proposal, many people would wind up paying less, especially apartment and condo owners. Many of us might more or less wind up paying the same, or a bit more. But some property owners — think of parking lots or malls surrounded by vast parking lots — would wind up paying a lot more, specifically because they are contributing a lot more to the problem we’re trying to solve.

Those big property owners would have an incentive to add things like rain gardens or permeable surfaces to mitigate the problem and lower their own rates.

That may be a good idea, or a bad idea. But it isn’t a rain tax. And it isn’t new, or unique.

City council first asked the city’s staff to investigate this idea in 2013, when Rob Ford was mayor, after a couple of big floods overwhelmed the city within a few years. Then it came back to city hall in 2017, when John Tory was mayor, and his executive shelved the idea over a bunch of concerns. In 2021, with Tory still in charge, city council told staff to take another run at it and bring it back for public consultation. That’s what’s happening now.

In the meantime, our neighbours in Mississauga, Hamilton and Brampton have implemented a similar system. So have Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax and Victoria.

Internationally, such charges exist already in Germany, Italy, and U.S. cities including Philadelphia, Seattle and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in both Virginia and Maryland.

So what’s the big deal? Near as I can tell, a Toronto Sun columnist who doesn’t like it came up with a clever name that makes it sound stupid.

In 2017, then-Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti branded the earlier proposal the “roof tax” to help kill it. Now they’re calling it a rain tax, and that’s gone viral internationally.

People will say that in this socialmedia culture-war age, our debates too often wind up in the gutter. Here, you could say it’s gone right into the sewers. Maybe appropriate, given the topic, even if the outrage doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A stormwater charge would mostly impact large property owners, because they are the largest contributors to stormwater flooding. Many urban neighbours and other countries have similar systems