Toronto council’s $3 billion choice doesn’t inspire trust
Reasonable people understand the city may need to raise more revenue. But they’re not sure this council will spend their taxes wisely.

thestar.com
June 27, 2016
By Royson James

Very shortly, your city council will be debating a proposal to tax you more, impose tolls, nickel-and-dime you and impose several strategies to extract more money from your pocket.

I support the measure in principle. In practice, city councillors have made it near impossible to advocate their position.

Having watched the city’s budget-making exercise since the 1980s, the idea that Toronto the city is strapped for cash has been drummed into the brain by successive city managers, CFOs and mayors.

This space has argued for a new deal for cities, taken prime ministers and premiers to task for abandoning Toronto, and urged city councillors to implement revenue tools that will produce cash for city services and programs.

Reader response to such advocacy has often been: “Show me you can take care of the taxes you have taken from me before you ask for more.”

I often thought that unfair. Since the 1990s, Toronto has undergone many belt-tightening exercises. The recession didn’t help; Mike Harris aggravated the problem. The download of services made matters worse. There has been billions in “savings.”

Since those horrible days at the turn of the millennium, the advocacy has started to yield dividends. Queen’s Park and Ottawa are populated by governments that don’t see cities as enemies. The spending tap has been turned on. The city government is getting more infrastructure dollars than at any time.

The province has given Toronto the right and authority to impose taxes or revenue tools, commensurate with its status as the country’s largest city. The federal Liberals finally engage Toronto on its spending needs.

Yet, the city manager says Toronto is on the verge of serious fiscal danger - if it doesn’t unlock new sources of funding.

Apparently, as much as $29 billion worth of projects - from social housing to transit and the like - are unfunded. That is, council has either approved them or stated them as desirable, but there is no pot of money to pay for them.

Citizens don’t have the time or patience to decipher the budgetary minutiae that might provide a glimpse of the budget truth. So they apply their own tests. A simple one is to watch what projects council routinely support. If council spends freely - or on programs of dubious worth - the taxpayer concludes that, really, there is no cash crunch.

I am out of arguments to offer in support of the city. How can a city in such a deep fiscal rut decide to spend more than $3 billion on a one-stop subway that will deliver 4,300 new riders and carry so few people?

A city in a fiscal vise would not turn its back on a $1.48-billion gift from the province to build a brand-new LRT line in its own right-of-way, linking the Scarborough Town Centre to the subway; neither would it opt to spend more than $3 billion for a subway in the same corridor instead.

A city in need - a downtown relief line costing upwards of $7 billion that has no money assigned, repairs to housing stock unfunded, transit lines worth billions but with no money assigned, an existing transit system struggling to stay on track amid maintenance breakdowns from old systems - would build transit to garner riders, not votes.

I have heard and seen enough to believe that Toronto needs new revenue tools - if the city is to thrive. But the behaviour of city councillors suggests they don’t believe it and they know something they are not telling us.

The last time former city manager Joe Pennachetti tried to get councillors to swallow the revenue-tools pill, they gagged and said no. It was an astonishing refusal, considering the dark forecast of life without the funding.

Since then, council continues to act as if the need for cash is exaggerated. Its members continue to approve projects, minus funding. The backlog has topped $29 billion. And the mayor merrily rolls along, promoting expensive transit options when practical ones exist at a fraction of the cost.

No sensible couple, scrambling for cash, working two jobs, would throw away thousands of dollars buying a fancy minivan when a subcompact would do handily.

And then line up outside their home, panhandling the neighbours.

Many Torontonians believe in the cause. But city hall actions, more recently on transit investments, force even supportive citizens to second-guess themselves.