Tory’s big shift: building the city, and paying for it
When even the tight-fisted Coun. Denzil Minnan-Wong is OK with a tax hike, we’ve turned a corner in a promising way, says Edward Keenan.

thestar.com
Dec. 2, 2015
By Edward Keenan

After Mayor John Tory’s big speech Wednesday, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong was asked a question in a media scrum about what he would say, in light of the mayor’s words, to those families who protested that they could not pay more taxes.

“What do you say to those families who want to build more transit?” he responded. “What do you say to those families who voted for SmartTrack, or want the Downtown Relief Line built?” They don’t want to pay more taxes, Minnan-Wong said, but they also want community recreation centres, they want affordable housing maintained, they want a beautiful waterfront. “We have to find the money,” he said. “You don’t build a city with Monopoly money.”

Now Minnan-Wong is the deputy mayor, so perhaps it seems predictable that he’d be out there like a good soldier supporting Tory. But he is also very likely Toronto’s most ideologically parsimonious member of council (with the possible exception of Rob Ford). Minnan-Wong led the opposition to David Miller’s revenue tools way back when, Minnan-Wong voted against the Scarborough subway on spending grounds, Minnan-Wong, you may recall, was the one screaming pink murder about the cost of umbrellas at Sugar Beach.

If you want a sense of the kind of shift the mayor had just announced in his team’s approach to governing the city, here was an indication: Denzil Minnan-Wong lecturing the press about the need to raise revenue to pay for building a great city.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

On Tuesday, Tory had sat at City Hall while city manager Peter Wallace outlined how, if not for an “unsustainably” hot real estate market the past few years, Toronto’s budget would have long ago “crashed and burned”; and drew attention to the $20 billion or more worth of important, even urgent, capital projects the city has not yet found a way to pay for. By Thursday, the mayor would be in Paris with the premier and the prime minister for talks addressing the state of the world’s climate (and, perhaps, also putting in a word to them about help in addressing those budget problems).

But Wednesday, on the anniversary of his swearing in as mayor, Tory was addressing the issue locally, in a “State of the City” speech. Up at the podium after lunch, Tory spoke of this growing city, one he said “really is on the verge of something really great.” He laid out some broad themes that he intends to develop through policy and governance - Toronto as a “City That Works,” a “City That Moves,” a “City That Cares.”

And then he moved on to the “State of Our City Finances.” Budgets are where talk turns into action, and here, at last, would be the news. After laying out the basics - in similar, if less threatening, terms as Peter Wallace used - Tory spoke (yet again) of the need for spending discipline and greater efficiency when dealing with operating expenses.

And then the big shift: to deal with that $20-billion capital backlog, Tory proposed a 2.5 per cent property tax increase, phased in over five years, beginning in 2017 (when the escalation of the dedicated Scarborough subway tax is scheduled to end). This money would go into a “City Building Fund” to begin paying the city’s share of needed transit and housing capital projects: the community housing maintenance crisis, for instance, or flood protection on the mouth of the Don River that would allow the Port Lands to be developed. He suggested the tax increase he proposed was just a start to the fund, and said he’d seek ideas from his colleagues, city staff and the public on how to build it.

Tory almost undersold his proposal during his speech, emphasizing the modesty of the tax increase. (Just $13 for the average household in the first year! Not mentioned: after fully phased in, it’s more like $65 per year, in perpetuity.) But make no mistake: this is a big deal.

Not purely for the revenue it will draw. (When fully phased in, the tax would raise up to an estimated $70 million per year, which is likely enough to pay the carrying costs on, maybe, a couple billion dollars in debt.) And not just because he has suggested that the fund will also have other streams feeding it. (Development charge increases? Road tolls? Parking charges? Who knows? But the door is open.) And not even just because the fund itself (and the priority list of city projects it is to pay for) is meant in part as checkered flag to wave in front of a Trudeau government revving the engine on a new $20-billion federal infrastructure fund.

Not just all that. It’s a big deal because, a year after being sworn in, the mayor who has all along insisted that tax increases are not the solution to the city’s problems has suddenly declared that tax increases are part of the solution. Some will say that’s a flip-flop or a broken promise. But it appears to me like an adjustment to the plain facts of the situation. And a welcome departure from a proud tradition of Toronto politicians talking about building things and not talking about paying for them. Coupled with Wallace’s address at city hall a day earlier, it appears that an overdue session of real talk is beginning.

If many have had doubts that Tory would come around and face reality on some hard questions, he has begun to address those doubts. If many have doubted he could persuade his more conservative allies on council, well - well, there was Denzil Minnan-Wong, city-building advocate.

Of course, there are still harsh realities to deal with in operating budgets, and in transit plans themselves, and in every other niggling corner of the city’s government. Time will tell how well Tory confronts those. But today, the mayor of Toronto suddenly appears more willing than before - eager, even - to deal with harsh realities.

“This won’t solve the problem,” the mayor said after his speech. “But it’s a start.”