Toronto’s wish lists go nowhere when tax talk is forbidden
'Revenue tools' is not a dirty word, says Toronto's city manager. But politicians refuse to go there.

thestar.com
Jan. 14, 2016
By Christopher Hume

Pity those poor journalists fated to cover Toronto politics. The problem isn’t that there are so many stories to report, but so few. It’s like covering the Maple Leafs: How many different ways can you say, they lost again?

Here in Groundhog City, the news just repeats itself over and over.

Take the annual budget process, for instance; if anyone needed to be reminded how the civic wheels spin without gaining traction, the budget is it. The details may vary - names, dates and the like - but the issues never change. Whether the subject is transit, subsidized housing or infrastructure, Toronto can’t pay its way. The TTC alone has a $2.3-billion capital shortfall. Toronto Community Housing still needs $1.75 billion to meet the cost of upkeep. The city’s unfunded capital project backlog now stands at $22.3 billion.

A gap so big makes clear how civic governance in this city has grown disconnected and largely meaningless. As often as not, council decisions amount to nothing more than an elaborate wish list, a (politically motivated) declaration of desire that few take seriously, least of all councillors themselves.

Though Mayor John Tory has brought decency and intelligence to the office, he has demonstrated that good intentions are not enough. Like chief magistrates before him, Tory has continued the tradition of avoiding the one issue that matters more than any other - money.

Toronto doesn’t have enough of it.

The city’s new senior bureaucrat, Peter Wallace, has tried to bring council into the real world, but it has steadfastly refused to go there. These emperors with no clothes find strength in their shared nakedness.

“‘Revenue tools’ is not a dirty word,” Wallace declared earlier this month. “Revenue tools are exactly what has saved the City of Toronto and exactly what has allowed the City of Toronto to continue to prosper and make public investments.”

According to Wallace, Toronto has survived fiscally intact thanks to the land transfer tax. It allows the city to cash in on the decades-old real estate boom that has remade the urban landscape top to bottom.

Through it all, however, Tory remains adamant he won’t raise property taxes more than the rate of inflation. Other options - road tolls, parking levies, congestion fees, etc. - can’t be broached.

Indeed, in 2006 the City of Toronto Act gave the city taxation powers it has yet to use.

True, last month the mayor proposed a City Building Fund, a 0.5 percent levy on property taxes that would be dedicated to transit and housing. But it would only raise about $70 million annually, not nearly enough to cover the city’s needs.

“I think people have a choice,” Tory said at his State of the City address in December: “We can continue with this grossly misleading approach...which is to announce the approval of all these projects that we know we need, especially when it comes to transit and housing, but not making any provisions about how we’re going to pay for them.”

If Tory’s words tell us anything, it is that although city leaders recognize the problem, they choose not to do anything about it. But until they do, they remain irrelevant.

Until Toronto fixes its failed governance system, it is doomed to repeat this cycle of futility ad infinitum. In addition to focusing on the what of civic policy, we need to examine the how. Taking care of one will allow us to deal with the other. Until then, it’s a waste of time.