We have officially arrived at the time of year when it takes a pretty big disaster to get the attention of the public, which is rapidly tuning out in favour of focusing on both the joys and the logistical challenges of the holiday weeks to come. I am very much aware of the fact that this column will also likely get far below its usual readership for that exact same reason. Perhaps this makes it a good opportunity to reiterate one of my less-popular opinions: Toronto should raise property taxes and do a better job funding itself.
I recently read Olivia Chow’sconversation with reporter David Rider in the Toronto Star. Chow acknowledged being grateful for having been able to reach an agreement with Doug Ford and the provincial government. But she also noted that making real headway on Toronto’s challenges was going to require a commitment from the federal government. You know, a cash commitment.
I have no doubt that the federal government is going to come up with some bucks for Toronto. In fact, Justin Trudeau was in town Thursday to announce $471 million in housing money for the city. We have to assume that the Liberals have already identified some other goodies that they will rain down upon Toronto voters eventually, but only after an election is obviously imminent. (That’s not to say that there won’t be more announcements before then, just that they’ll hold some things back.) If this sounds cynical, well, look around and tell me you think I’m wrong.
But back to the here and now in Toronto. Chow has identified as a major challenge the number of refugees that have arrived in the city, overwhelming Toronto’s ability to house them, especially given the overall higher number of homeless people living in the city. It’s a legitimate problem, and Chow is in the moral and political right when she notes that the federal government ought to be helping Toronto out with the consequences of decisions that are, after all, largely in the federal domain. An enduring feature of our current federal government is that it takes an awfully long time to do even the easy things it clearly wants to do. You can’t count on these guys to show up when you need them to, even if you’re confident they eventually will.
Which brings us back to where we began. Toronto is simply too big and important, even if only for its own residents, to rely on the generosity and crass political calculations of other levels of government. The city needs to start taking its fate into its own hands. It needs to tax its residents more so that it has a larger sustainable base of predictable revenue that it can use to address its own problems.
Given the pressures of inflation and the broader “cost of living crisis," which seems to be the agreed-upon parlance in political circles (and I don't have anything better), I get why this is going to be even less popular a proposal than usual. Normally, I would at least make a token suggestion that the city actually undertake a rigorous program review and simply stop spending money on some things so that it could spend more money on others.
But I just don’t see any prospect of that happening now, politically. And frankly, the city has now fallen so far behind in many critical areas, including simply basic upkeep of city properties and facilities, that I doubt we can efficiency our way back to a state of good repair. We need bucks. Lots of bucks. Lots of bucks for lots of years so we can throw those bucks at lots of problems we have allowed to accumulate. Chow might be the only mayor of Toronto in relatively recent memory — might be — who would be prepared to take on the political risk of actually going ahead and raising these bucks by simply raising property taxes.
Don’t get me wrong, if we can figure out some other combination of user fees or road tolls or whatever, I’ll have an open mind that. I just don’t see any likelihood of success on that front, either. Doug Ford will only tolerate so much, to be blunt. Chow would need his permission and blessing to do a lot of the more innovative things. But she and council can decide to raise property taxes. They could then take that money and use it at their discretion to fix whatever the city's most pressing needs are.
This is a classic example of something you see over and over in Canadian politics. We have a problem that needs to be fixed, and the fix is not mysterious. It’s just unpopular. And that is a very important distinction. There are tons of problems in the world that I really have no idea how to solve. This is one of the happier subset of problems: easily solved if someone will just grow sufficient spine to do what needs to be done.
The province has already stepped up with more money for Toronto. In due time, and in line with their own political needs, the feds will almost certainly do more of the same. In the meantime, Chow, and her allies on council, should get going on raising the taxes Torontonians actually pay, so that they can then spend that money on fixing the many things that are broken or failing in this city.
I really wish I had a better option to offer, because I’m in no particular rush to see my own taxes go up. But the city has visibly decayed before my eyes since I moved back here from the suburbs almost a decade to go. Some of the problems this causes are unpleasant and embarrassing; some of the problems this causes are literally matters of life and death for real people who need our help. We can begin to make some headway on these problems, and all we need to get started is cash. Mayor Chow and the council has a pretty reliable and effective and proven way of raising that cash. Now would be a good time.
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