Everything old is new again. In 2010, Doug Ford won a seat on Toronto city council as his brother Rob was elevated to the mayor’s office, having prevailed in that year’s election and succeeded progressive David Miller. The Fords rapidly set about dismantling major parts of Miller’s legacy, including by waging a war on cyclists and the bike lanes they use. Now, in 2024, Doug Ford will get to rail against Miller all over again as he resumes his war against bike lanes: on Wednesday, NDP leader Marit Stiles announced Miller would advise her party on the shape of a “new deal for cities.”
“The health of our municipal governments in Ontario is at serious risk, and we see the results on the streets and in the lives of people, from crumbling bridges to needless debates about things like bike lanes,” Miller said at Queen’s Park on Wednesday morning. “The provincial/local government relationship is broken, and it needs to be fixed.”
(Miller began his career as an NDP-aligned member of city council; as mayor, he would later abandon his membership, saying that his partisan allegiance was an obstacle to productive relationships with Liberals at Queen’s Park and Tories in Ottawa.)
Stiles has made a new deal central to her pre-election messaging this week. The NDP introduced a motion on Monday calling for the province to assume responsibility for a number of areas that are currently handled by municipalities and funded largely by property taxes. That list includes public health, housing, highways, and major infrastructure projects. When debate concluded Monday afternoon, the Progressive Conservative majority at Queen’s Park voted it down, 29-65, with all of the “ayes” being opposition MPPs of the NDP, Liberal, Green or independent variety.
The premier has, of course, signed some important agreements billed as “new deals” for some of Ontario’s cities. In Toronto and Ottawa, provincial intervention has undoubtedly helped mayors Olivia Chow and Mark Sutcliffe address the most gaping holes in their respective budgets. The provincial offer to take over the Gardiner Expressway alone represents a massive improvement in Toronto’s long-term capital budget, since the antiquated elevated road threatened to suck up nearly all the available infrastructure cash.
The problem is that, even if those deals could solve all the problems the provincial and national capitals face (they can’t and won’t), there are 442 other municipalities in the province. And they face their own problems that all, more or less, flow from the same underlying cause: Ontario, more than other provinces, pushes responsibility for a lot of expensive jobs to the municipal level without giving those municipalities the financial firepower to address them competently.
And it’s not just a big-city concern, either.
“I would say, ‘How’s the current situation working out for you?’ At some point, we’ve got to start with that,” Zorra Township mayor Marcus Ryan told TVO Today at the legislature Monday. “In Woodstock, in Tilsonburg, in Ingersoll, we’ve got people living in tents under bridges, we’ve got needles in parks.”
Ryan acknowledges that the median voter might find matters like the division of fiscal responsibility a bit abstract, but says that it’s reflected in the real and obvious issues facing Ontario cities.
“This is not working, and one of the main thing that’s not working is that municipalities aren’t set up either by the services we offer or the taxes we collect to serve our communities right now,” Ryan says.
This is not a new problem — it certainly predates my time as a journalist — and the laws of arithmetic really allow for only two categories of solution: either we find ways to put expensive areas of responsibility back in the hands of the provincial government with its much more robust tax base or we find ways to send more money to municipalities. But it’s not as simple as Queen’s Park periodically writing cheques: if municipalities are going to have these responsibilities over the long term, they should be able to depend on funding over the long term, too, ideally with a source of funding that grows in line with both demographics and the economy.
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie has suggested she’s open to sharing sales-tax revenue with municipalities. That’s one way forward. The NDP is suggesting a broad uploading of responsibilities that would shift a huge fiscal burden away from property taxpayers (municipal budgets) and see those costs carried by sales and income taxpayers (the provincial budget). This is, of course, a kind of accounting gimmick — Stiles reiterated that, of course, there’s only one taxpayer. But if it were that simple, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now.
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The bigger question for provincial policymakers is what Queen’s Park would get out of a massive shift in responsibilities like the one proposed by the NDP. And should municipalities have to give up something more for what amounts to a massive fiscal shift in their favour? Stiles and the NDP say that the current arrangement puts the lie to Ford’s claim to have never raised taxes, since municipalities are raising property taxes every year to do jobs handed to them by the province. If those jobs became provincial responsibilities, would cities have to cut property taxes?
Speaking to her party’s motion on Monday, Stiles said that would be a question an NDP government would work with municipalities on.
“What I’m hearing is that people have reached their limit. We know that living in Ontario is more expensive than it has ever been,” she said. “So we need to find ways to help make life more affordable, but we also have to deliver the services they need.”
One answer, alluded to by Ryan: the status quo is broken and not working, having a system that does what it’s supposed to — that works, in short — is an end in itself and worth the added provincial expenses, and municipalities could put their additional spending power to work meeting their remaining responsibilities. But municipal dysfunction touches many other provincial priorities, not least the housing-affordability file. So there’s an obvious question: If the NDP or any other government is willing to put municipalities on a more solid, permanent fiscal footing, what quid is possible for the quo?
Some of the possibilities are already at hand. The opposition parties are unanimous in their desire to legalize fourplexes and other more dense forms of housing, but actually getting that done would mean Queen’s Park taking a more prescriptive hand in local planning rules to cut through municipal obstruction. Another idea would be something like what Liberal leadership candidate Yasir Naqvi floated last summer: having Queen’s Park zero out municipal development charges. Given the scale of what Stiles has been proposing, you could eliminate these taxes on new homes, and municipalities would still be ahead overall.
This isn’t to say that such a bargain would be popular with municipal leaders, who, like humans everywhere, would like to give up as little as possible to gain the most. But the only reason to have this debate is to have well-run cities that meet the needs of Ontarians, and it would be a strange stroke of luck if that just happened to mean mayors and councillors didn’t have any hard choices to make themselves.
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