Budget Increase
Toronto City Council has passed the budget and will be increasing our taxes by 3.8%. Tell you something you don’t know! Well, Pickering residents will pay 8.6% more.
Apparently it wasn’t an overwhelming pass. Either 12 or 15 Councillors voted against it. I’d like to know who they were. I suspect one of those was Rob Ford, who, according to one newscast, made 45 motions to amend the budget. That’s impressive. I’d liked to have seen what they were, especially as he claimed together the motions would save $100 million. The motions I did hear about were for things like eliminating free passes to the zoo and free golf. But the Councillors thought that kind of belt tightening was unnecessary, that they do not need to be seen as increasing their own “user fees.” After all they got a comfy 4 years before the next election, and no one will remember. Still, they did vote to raid the reserve fund yet again — showing incredible fiscal irresponsibility as that’s for true emergencies when all other measures have failed, and they haven’t tried every measure available to them — and been beating the bankruptcy drums for the last few days. When did we suddenly face bankruptcy? Why only now are we hearing that word “bankruptcy”? Why did Councillors, especially those opposed to Mayor David Miller, not bring this issue up loudly and repeatedly last fall during the election? And if we’re so near the bottom of the barrel, why has there been no pay cuts, layoffs, paring services to the bone, all measures other jurisdictions have taken when facing bankruptcy? If this city is truly in a fiscal crisis, we need a leader like David Gunn was for the TTC or Margaret Thatcher in the UK or Jean Chretien for Canada, who if nothing else at least stopped the red ink running. We need a leader willing to stare down the unions, stare down the electorate, and bring the city spending back to essentials as well as refusing to pay for Ontario’s services until such time as we’re on our feet and fiscally healthy. We need a Council willing to open their minds to all possiblities with one goal in mind: put Toronto in the black. Oh well. Maybe in 4 years, we really will be bankrupt, and Torontonians can elect Miller again, just to give him one more chance, as that would only be fair.
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Notice how the City blames the Province, who blames the Federal who blame the US who blame the IYERAQIS AND AfGHANIS!
But to be fair, Ontario is the only province in Canada that does not fund all or almost all social services. These services were downloaded from the province on to Toronto by the provincial Harris Tories in the 1990’s. The Mcguinty liberals have continued this. So unlike all other major cities in Canada, Toronto pays for welfare, affordable housing and most other social services. And Toronto gets the lowest level of federal government funds for public transport than any other city in North America, even compared to the fucking tax averse US.
ROFL @blaming Afghanis!!! I needed the laugh!!
I compared subsidies of the TTC vs. American and Canadian cities on my blog awhile ago and boy are we in a totally different ballpark from EVERYONE else. And I buy your fairness argument. I’m just starting to wonder if the city is so in the red, why it just doesn’t go on strike — refuse to pay for social services? Another thing, Is any other government but the city paying for affordable housing? Ralston Saul had something interesting to say about that. Most of our homeless problem started when the province shut down the insitutions for the mentally ill then never built social housing for them, leaving only the streets for them to live on. Plus Saul said that young working men use homeless shelters because their pay is too low to afford housing. Who ends up supporting all of these people? Charities and the city.
Maybe this is all a result of amalgamation. Do you think things would be different for the city if we were all still divided? This does not look at all. I do believe that the blame should fall straight to the top, the feds. They allocate the dollars and in my opinion they aren’t doing it right. The province is just the the the middle man in this whole thing. After all they have their own butts to cover so they’ll give what they can afford. I think the blam goes to the feds…Who they blame after is another story :)
Good question. I don’t know how well things would be if we had not been amalgamated, but dipping into the reserve fund is a new thing I believe.
Although I agree the Feds are partly to blame, under the Constitution, municipalities are creatures of the Province, meaning that they are solely responsible for the city. With the recent Toronto Act, Toronto has gained some measure of independence through new taxing powers, but we’re still burdened with social costs.