Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe is calling for a new, fair deal for his city. At a press conference last week, the mayor urged the federal and provincial governments to provide more funding to address serious financial issues that he says are threatening Ottawa’s budget. Specifically, the mayor accused the federal government of depriving Ottawa of millions it is owed in fees that the federal government pays to the city instead of paying property taxes on the federal complexes in the city.
“Without getting help from the other levels of government, it’s going to be very painful,” Sutcliffe warned at his press conference. “We’ll have to raise taxes and transit fares enormously, or we’ll have to cut service drastically.”
I do not know enough about Ottawa’s situation to offer a meaningful comment on whether the mayor is right that his city is owed money that Ottawa is refusing to pay. If true, as a matter of general principle, I would support that part of his call. Governments should follow through on their pledges. This is a statement that shouldn’t be conditional, and it shouldn’t be controversial, come to think of it. Yet, it too often seems to be both.
Still, I would repeat to the good people of Ottawa, including its mayor and councillors, the same advice I’ve been offering the municipal leadership in my own hometown in recent years: the smartest thing you can do, and maybe the best thing you can do in the long run for your constituents, is to get your own fiscal house in order, even if that means raising local taxes or reducing services. What Sutcliffe is warning of as if it must be avoided is probably the smartest things he could do to make his own life easier. He shouldn’t resist it.
I’m hardly the first to make this observation, and it’s hardly the first time I’ve made it myself, but Canadians have painted themselves into a corner over these past few decades. We’ve reached two conclusions independently of each other: the size and scope of the government we want, and the level of taxation we’re prepared to pay. Unfortunately, this is one of those situations in which we can have one or the other, but not both at the same time. As I have observed so many times before, sooner or later, we are going to have to make a decision. Do we want a smaller, leaner government, aligned with generally fiscally conservative principles, at the current level of taxation, or perhaps even lower? Or do we want the current level of services, perhaps even expanded services, at the current level of taxation or higher?
We really are going to need to decide this at some point. Personally, I think now would be a great time.
In general, I like our federal system. I like the way we have divided different powers and authorities among different orders of government. I’d probably tweak some things, but, overall, I’m a fan. However, one admitted liability of this kind of system is that it gives way too many politicians — at all three orders of government — the opportunity to blame problems on the other guy. Or maybe on a couple of levels of other guys. Instead of feeling any sense of personal responsibility to fix a problem or, frankly, any sense of fear that voters may simply blame them for the problem, our politicians routinely gamble on their ability to acknowledge that a problem exists without having to actually accept any responsibility for it. Our division of powers, helpful and useful as it is in many ways, also divides up accountability and responsibility, and our politicians at every level have optimized their daily grind to exploit to the absolute fullest the ambiguity offered by our system of government.
I don’t have a lot of optimistic daydreams left in me. Most of the few I had have withered and died on the vine over these past five years. But I still can’t help but sometimes daydream about a leader who steps up and simply says, “You know what? A lot of this isn’t supposed to be my responsibility, and a lot of it certainly isn’t my fault, but I have been elected to a position of considerable power, and it’s time for me to do something with it, even if that means I end up picking up the slack for someone else — because that’s the only way things are ever going to get better for the people I represent.”
Even as I write that, I know how absurdly delusional it sounds. And I want to assure readers that I’m not expecting any such thing to happen. I’m just saying it would be fantastic if it did. I would vote for that person — though I have a feeling, given that they would certainly have to raise taxes or cut services, that I would be in the minority in my eagerness to do so.
So let me put it in a more basic way: Sutcliffe should set Ottawa on a course to raise its own taxes or cut its own services and thereby fix its own problems (I’ve urged Toronto to do the same in the past). Not out of a sense of noble and pure political leadership, but purely out of a sense of motivated self-interest. Every mayor in this country and every councillor across the land should be absolutely clear on the fact that their provincial and federal partners will have no problem leaving them high and dry — up a certain creek without a paddle, in an admittedly mixed metaphor — if it serves their own particular interest. Any “fair deal” or “new partnership,” whatever we want to call it, is only ever going to be at the convenience of the order of government that is signing the cheques. And the politicians who have to sign those cheques will always put their electoral fortunes ahead of the electoral fortunes of some other poor bastard working at some other order of government.
At the most fundamental level, this really is just another variation of the golden rule — the one that notes those with the gold make the rules. I’m all for collaboration between orders of government. I’m all for co-operative federalism or any other term we’d like to use to describe it. But everyone should approach that from a position of strength and confidence. Ottawa, Toronto, and every town and city across the land should approach every negotiation from as strong a fiscal position as possible.
I don’t care if that means chopping the size of government to bring fiscal balance back to municipal taxpayers. I don’t care if that means raising taxes to fund current or new services and address infrastructure needs. I’m going to leave that to local officials to decide for themselves, in line with their local circumstances and ideological preferences (and those of the voters).
But stop waiting for other people to show up and save you. No one is going to. And the sooner our politicians start admitting that, the sooner the potholes in our streets just might — if we’re really lucky — start to get filled.
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