Keeping Toronto ‘affordable’ will cost us all
Property taxes may have been kept low but fees and costs for city services are quickly rising.

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Feb. 1, 2017

Affordable. “Affordable.” Politicians keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Or at least, I do not understand the word’s meaning in the way they are using it. For instance, Toronto’s budget chief Gary Crawford recently said that the budget his committee has prepared to present to city council this month is “affordable for the residents of this city.”

If you want to discern what Crawford means, you can look around to see the ventriloquist’s lips moving from across city hall’s second floor: “Keeping Toronto more affordable for hard-working residents” was Mayor John Tory’s rallying cry earlier in the budget process, and he used it explicitly to justify what CBC characterized as his vow to “fight against” raising property taxes. This is the mayor’s long-standing preferred usage - you can go back to his campaign platform and see that his main slogan promised an “affordable” city and unpacked that promise as meaning: “A more affordable Toronto means keeping taxes low, particularly the city’s property taxes.”

Well, you might say, fair enough. If property taxes are kept lower, then I have more money, which makes life in general more affordable. But here’s the thing that makes this narrow definition of the term stretch to the point of breaking: Tory and Crawford’s budgets have fairly consistently and systematically, and sometimes dramatically, raised the prices of all kinds of other things.

Transit, for instance: In 2014, when Tory was elected on a pledge to freeze TTC fares, a monthly pass cost $133.75. Today, after consecutive raises in price, it costs $146.25. This is an increase of just under 10 per cent - an annual increase of $150, for a pass holder. (Tokens prices have gone up 11 per cent in the same time, cash fares up 8.3 per cent.)

Or garbage collection. Since 2014, the owner of an “extra large” garbage bin has seen their garbage rate (after rebates) go up from $217.21 to $420.59. Conservers who use the “small” bin haven’t had it much better, as their rate (after rebates) went from $6.72 up to $22.66, an increase of 337 per cent under Mayor Tory.

Buying a house this year? The land transfer tax is being “harmonized” in a way that will see the average home purchaser pay about $750 more than they did last year. Middle-class parent with toddlers in a school-based daycare? The end of a city rent subsidy to school boards means rates are likely to go up about $350 per year per kid. Sending that kid to an introductory gymnastics or arts and crafts program at a community centre? Those program rates are proposed to go up 12.3 per cent. The list could go on for quite a while: user fees are being jacked up in 2017 to about 8 per cent of revenues, from 5 per cent in 2015, an increase of $332 million across the board in those budget years.

All these price hikes and tax increases offered in the name of keeping the city “affordable.” Affordable for whom? Not, apparently, many people who use the services the city offers. Not, apparently, for someone looking to buy a home rather than just sitting in the one they bought decades ago. Not, apparently, for anyone riding the bus.

All this at the same time as program and staffing budgets to deliver city services are strangled, in the name of the same goal. For the eleventy-jillionth straight year, the city has launched a Great Waste Hunt, this time in the form of Crawford’s “Accountability and Affordability Plan” - there’s that word again - to further study cutting costs and finding greater efficiencies.

Crawford and Tory like to repeat that they can’t in good conscience raise property taxes to properly fund the city’s services until they are confident there’s no more waste to be eliminated, and so they hunt and hunt and hunt.

Anyhow, “affordable.” Tory had recently finally figured on a kind of user fee - in the form of road tolls on city highways - that might generate big revenue, that he would agree met his threshold. A big part of why this was the case is that the burden of paying it would be shared by those who live in other cities and drive into Toronto every day on our roads and use our infrastructure.

But Kathleen Wynne killed it, for pretty much precisely the same reason. And what did she say while she was explaining its unacceptability? “It has to be that whatever we do is more affordable, not less affordable, for people.” The tolls were to fund debt financing for big capital projects, while the gas tax revenue she shared instead is not eligible for that purpose. She did not suggest how one “affordably” generates financing for $33 billion in construction. Or whether the Gardiner Expressway becomes more “affordable” for people when it falls down where it stands, or whether subway lines are more “affordable” when people actually physically cannot board them because they have become too full. Is social housing more “affordable” when we shutter units because they crumble around those who live in them?

No. Those things will have to be paid for some other way. If not with property taxes, at Tory’s insistence, and if not with road tolls, per Wynne’s orders, then how? Jack up transit fares and community rec centre user fees and garbage rates and permit fees ever higher? Close off services that make the city a pleasure to live in? Make the city even less affordable for the people living here? Isn’t that what we say we’re trying to avoid?

When Wynne says “affordable,” she appears to mean voters in swing ridings in the 905 shouldn’t have to pay. When Tory says “affordable” he means low property taxes. In both cases, the word they appear to be looking for is not “affordable” but “politically safe.” And as budgets are stretched thinner, services grow less available and more expensive, and infrastructure crumbles, that definition appears less adequate to our needs every passing day.