Ontarians will soon head to the polls to pick the officials whose time in office will have the most direct impact on the affordability of their day-to-day lives. That’s right — municipal elections are, in some ways, more important than elections for any other level of government.
Why, you ask? “From the time you get up in the morning to the time you get to work or school or whatever, you’ve used municipal services,” says Enid Slack, director of the University of Toronto’s Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance.
Mayors and councils are where the rubber hits the (municipally funded) road in politics. The decisions they make can land you in an unsustainably expensive living situation or ensure you have affordable access to the resources you need to work and play.
Since the main source of funding is the people who live within the municipality and use its services, Slack says, “both what [municipalities] do affects people and how they pay for it affects people.”
TVO.org speaks with Slack and other experts to dig into how affordability shows up on the ballot at municipal elections — and get tools that can help you decide how to cast your vote.
What municipalities do that affects affordability
When it comes to housing, you might think about the Bank of Canada, which sets interest rates, or about the provincial government, which plays a big role in determining funding and capacity.
But with their all-important zoning powers, municipalities “are the keepers of [housing] supply,” says Leslie Woo, former chief planning and development officer at Metrolinx and current CEO of the CivicAction Leadership Foundation.
They make the rules about what can be built (single-family houses or rental apartments, for example) and where — though some have called for the province to overrule municipalities on certain zoning matters in the name of combatting the housing crisis.
Zoning is about more than housing, though: every building and greenspace in a municipality is the product of a zoning decision about how that space can be used. Municipalities “are the ones that make requirements for open space and community amenities,” says Woo. They dictate where parks and rec centres are located and whether they have resources like bathrooms or splash pads. Good recreational infrastructure might mean you don’t need to pay for a private gym membership or to bring your kid to a water park.
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The affordability of the food system is also a municipal issue, since this level of government determines where grocery stores, restaurants, and food banks (as well as farms both urban and rural) are located. “Municipalities can play a key role in strengthening our food system and improving our access to food,” Courtney O’Neill of the Simcoe Food Council recently told Bradford Today.
The connections between all these sites, whether roads or subway tunnels, are also municipal responsibilities. Whether you drive, bike, take transit, or do all three, municipalities play a key role in the affordability of your transportation options to and from, well, everything — work, school, recreational activities, community events.
“Transportation can cost anything from 0 per cent, if you’re working from home, to 15 per cent of your household budget,” says Carolyn Whitzman, a geography professor at the University of Ottawa who has long worked on urban-planning issues. If you live an hour or more away from work in order to afford a home, she says, that’s especially true: “If you’re two adults living in a house, and you need two cars, that can start being very easily your second-biggest cost.”
Since municipalities play a key role in locating transit and working with other levels of government to get it built, they are essential to alleviating such pressures. They’re also in charge of basic maintenance for things like the road network, which can determine whether it’s safe to bike or walk instead of driving and whether transit along your route is adequately supported with infrastructure like bus shelters, so you can get where you need to go without getting drenched.
“Transportation is key,” says Slack. “If you want entertainment, if you need services, if you need to get to work, transportation is key to all that.”
How municipalities pay for it all
Given all of this, it’s easy to see that municipalities fund and coordinate a vast array of services that play a huge role in both the quality and cost of living for residents. They do all this while under financial constraints that no other level of government experiences — for one thing, they’re legally required to end each fiscal year with a balanced budget.
For another, says Slack, “They’re limited in terms of how they can raise revenues to pay for them.” Property taxes, user fees for services like transit or recreational programming, and transfers from the provincial (and occasionally the federal) government make up the municipal budget. Municipalities can take on debt under specific circumstances, but usually only to fund capital projects, not day-to-day operations.
Raising property taxes means homeowners and renters (yes, they pay property tax, too, often at a higher rate than homeowners) have less to spend on other things. Raising commercial property taxes can also have a big impact on businesses, which may then pass costs on to consumers.
In Toronto, as John Michael McGrath writes for TVO.org, “we’re seeing signs of a city that is simply not spending enough to maintain the current level of public services — much less do anything more ambitious than the status quo.”
Property-tax hikes are a politically unpopular move. But they’re essential to keeping municipal services going, writes McGrath. “At this point, progressive critics of Tory and other thrift-minded mayors around Ontario will say that the answer is for councils to make the affirmative argument for better public services and the higher property taxes that must necessarily go with them — or, failing that, for better supports from other levels of government,” he writes. “And they have a point, if only because arithmetic really doesn’t allow for any other answers.”
Agenda segment, September 7, 2022: Are people paying attention to municipal elections?
Municipal governments do have a few other tools to pay for things, like user fees for services — one big example is transit fares. But these don’t make up the bulk of municipal income.
Meanwhile, municipalities around the province are also struggling with infrastructure deficit, says Slack. While we’ve seen high-profile bankruptcies in American cities in recent years, she says, most Canadian cities balance their operating budgets and don’t borrow beyond those specific limits. “They’re fiscally healthy,” she says. “But it’s been at the expense of their overall health, I would say, because their infrastructure is deteriorating.”
Looking for a good municipal leader means looking for someone who can act on both sides of this equation, says Woo — someone who can raise money and also spend it: “Much of what we need for a high quality of life, the free market can’t cover.”
For her, the best municipal governments are those that can collaborate with other stakeholders — business, provincial and federal governments, and other municipalities — to make the most of the funding each holds. Affordability is an issue, she says, that “no level of government, no one council, no one mayor can solve on their own.”
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