Toronto mayor Olivia Chow just did something delightfully devious to Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada. And she did it in full view of 40 million people.
The city has serious fiscal problems. This is not a secret; it was only a few weeks ago, in fact, that I repeated my plea for the city to raise property taxes and thereby become more of the master of its own destiny. And that does, indeed, seem to be the plan, and in a big way. Toronto is laying out plans for a 10.5 per cent property-tax increase. Specifically, 9 per cent on the general property tax plus an additional 1.5 per cent for the City Building Fund. But the plan also warns of a further 6 per cent hike.
And that is where the delightful part comes in.
In that recent column of mine, I noted the political calculus for both Toronto and the federal government. Toronto has claimed, I think rightly, that the feds should step up and provide some funding for services for refugees. Federal policy is in favour of admitting refugees in large numbers, and I support this, as a matter of moral principle. But moral principle doesn’t feed or house people. Money, infrastructure, and personnel do. The federal government has been doing the right moral thing — no doubt with an eye to the political benefits such generosity could bring among certain key voter demographics, but still. It has not had to pick up much of the fiscal tab for that generosity. And, besides, it has shown many times over that it is willing to spend.
The work of actually providing the services that refugees require, and housing them, is landing on lower orders of government. Toronto, as the largest city, picks up a disproportionate share of this tab. We’ve already heard horrible stories of refugees and migrants sleeping on the street in front of churches and shelters that simply cannot take in any more people. This is clearly an example, one of many, of how the division of powers across our orders of government can result in policy incoherence. The actions of one level of government, taken for its own benefit, are causing problems for another level of government — in this case, one that simply does not have the same ability to respond.
That all sounds very technical, and we shouldn’t forget the fact that we are talking about refugees, people who have already endured a lot and have shown up here only to discover that there is no support for them. They are literally ending up, in too many cases, out of doors and out of luck. Toronto has been agitating for a while for more federal money. Specifically, it wants a quarter billion a year. I honestly don’t know what the right number should be. I would imagine that the federal government is looking at that particular figure with some skepticism. But it is the figure Toronto is running with, and it has now clearly signalled to the public that one of two things is going to happen. The feds are going to cough up the bucks to fix the problem they created for Toronto, or Toronto is going to ding property owners to fix the problem Trudeau created and does not want to do anything to fix.
Obviously, I’m using the Toronto formulation above. The feds would no doubt quibble, and we should keep an open mind for their argument, whatever it ends up being. But let’s just look at the politics of this for a minute. Toronto proposes to call the extra 6 per cent tax increase the Federal Impacts Levy. That’s genius. It’s baked right into the name. Chow has just kicked off a game of chicken with the feds and isn’t playing nice. I love it.
This all has to be viewed in line with the federal government’s current problems. I had observed with interest last month some Liberal-friendly commentators and social-media proxies seeming to take real relief from what they felt had been a series of bad weeks for Conservative federal leader Pierre Poilievre. There seemed to be some hope in at least some parts of Liberaldom that the LPC’s slide, which began last summer, would reverse itself as Canadians got a better look at the Conservative leader.
It was possible, I thought at the time. And it could still easily happen. But it hasn’t happened yet. Even factoring in that it can take weeks for events to be captured by the polls, enough time has passed. There has been absolutely no meaningful change in the federal polling situation: the Conservative Party of Canada has a major lead and would win a large majority government, potentially extremely large, if an election were held today. There might have been brief signs of some kind of LPC recovery — or at least floor finding — late last year, but it was never meaningful enough to take for certain. And it seems to have begun to reverse itself anyway.
None of these polls holds much good news for the Liberals. Indeed, most of them hold awful news for the Liberals. One of the only reasonably cheerful bits of news is that the Liberals will likely maintain much of their strength in the city of Toronto. Not all of it. Numbers like this would likely flip some 416 ridings blue if they hold to the next election. But, all in all, Toronto is one of the only things federal Liberals should be feeling good about.
Chow can read polls, too. She is taking the fight directly to one of the only remaining bastions of support the Trudeau Liberals have, and she ain’t being subtle. I’m not going to make any predictions yet as to how the Liberals will respond, but it’s not too early to note that Chow is playing hardball — more, that she’s playing hardball in a really smart way.
It’s up to the feds to decide how they’re going to respond now. And that will be interesting to watch.
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