Ontario’s Surplus, Our Shortfall
So Ontario has a $2.3 billion surplus. Nice timing on the announcement. Apparently it’s old news as the Ontario government has already spent it on debt reduction, probably back at budget time. But who wants to tell the people about this kind of good news when it’s nowhere near election time? The people will forget about this goodie come October, and it’s a big one.
Now what should he have done with that surplus? Well, there’s this huge piece of his budget he’s still expecting Toronto to pay. The surplus was almost exactly what Toronto pays for provincial services. With one fell swoop, McGuinty could have instantly uploaded back all the services Premier Mike Harris downloaded to Toronto (Toronto’s budget is $7 to 8 billion, one-third of which is provincially mandated social services and such like). Of course, he may not have had a surplus or just a tiny one after that; then again he could have sealed his win here in the big city, for Torontonians are nothing if not slavering to find any excuse to vote in a Liberal MPP or MP, and that excuse would have been a doozy. Instead McGuinty chickened out and continues to pretend it’s our problem. He couldn’t even toss us a bone of the half billion we need to wipe out our budget shortfall.
So will Mayor Miller step up and milk this golden opportunity to prove how badly the province has abandoned us? Not holding my breath. Too bad John Tory isn’t taking advantage of it either.
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I don’t understand why the province, which is paid into by people outside of Toronto as well as Toronto, should spend its surplus to bail out Toronto. Other people in Ontario in other cities pay higher property taxes and the like to properly balance their municipal budgets, why should their tax dollars also go to paying off Toronto’s deficits when they refuse to raise taxes as well?
The one infuriating trait almost all Torontonians have is the self-centrism. Ontario does not exist to bail you out, other cities in the province are doing just fine — the problem is with your municipal government and this is not the fault nor the obligation of the citizens in Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, etc.
Toronto needs to learn to deal with its own problems without crying for money from everyone else. Stupidity in spending money (buying theatres, the pay raises, etc) should not be rewarded.
“I don’t understand why the province, which is paid into by people outside of Toronto as well as Toronto, should spend its surplus to bail out Toronto.”
For the simple reason, as I said above, that Toronto is paying for Ontario’s services — that is, services you receive as a citizen of Ontario — which other municipalities no longer have to pay for. We started paying for these services under Mike Harris; before that, we were doing OK fiscally.
Furthermore, Toronto pays $9 billion — that’s ‘b’ for billion — more in income taxes than it receives back in services. In other words, Torontonians are paying for your provincial and federal services. What would you do if you no longer had access to our income taxes? You’d suffer big time. Policing, emergency services, hospitals, your local college or university — right now all of these are at the levels you enjoy because we Torontonians are paying for them in greater proportion (not just per capita) than you are.
Of course, if you want to go the way of not supporting each other, Toronto would be far better off. We could keep our share of our income taxes and pay for all our municipal, provincial, and federal services quite nicely. In that sense, your perpetuation of anti-Toronto bias would have a boomerang destructive effect, back on you.
A bit ironic you complaining about self-centrism. What are you doing in your post but spreading a fallacy that makes you look like the victim instead of Toronto, just what you’re complaining Torontonians do. Nice way to distort the truth to support your anti-Toronto bias. But if we go down, you go down with us because that $9 billion outflow, that you currently benefit from, will stop with the exodus of people out of the city and the collapse of our economy. And your homegrown poor and homeless that we currently support may start moving back home.
And yes, our politicians are idiots. But it doesn’t negate the fact we’re still paying for provincial services, which nobody’s property taxes are supposed to pay for, and our property taxes did go up.
And it’s not as though the current provincial/municipal funding model is working brilliantly in the rest of the province, as the first commenter suggests. Amalgamated Ottawa, for instance, has had a series of contentious rounds of budgeting — you can still see a few “My Ottawa includes culture” signs up from years ago, part of a particularly big to-do.
(And as in all places, the genius of the electorate ensures victory for whomever makes the most extravagant promises not to ever raise taxes ever.)
“Uploading” promises are starting to appear from the provincial parties as the election nears. But see my parenthetical remark above.