Friday’s Headlines

12 comments

1. Don’t tell me that bus was racing to get to Casino Rama.

2. Royson James said it best, blame Rob Ford for listening to selfish taxpayers…to raise such a stink over $60 is a joke.. The argument that its a tax on car owners is true, but were talking about adding the cost of a tank of gas or two to your annual bill. I’m one that has no problem with taxes provided I know I’m getting service in return…and maybe as many have suggested this tax was implement or managed inappropriately, similar to the bag tax. I would have much preferred to hear that council had debated for 10 hours on where that money should have gone rather than eliminate it all together. To put it into perspective the almost 50 M a year that would be collected would fund a km of LRT construction. I’d pay $60 a year to see new transit funded wouldn’t you? Well I guess not all of you.

3. Oh spare me.  Even George Smitherman was going to reduce the PVT if elected.  If you want another $50 million a year for transit there are still other ways to raise it. The real problem with this tax along with the the MLTT is that they come from the City of Toronto Act.  If the same taxes were available to all municipalities it might be easier to defend them.  Paying double the registration fee for the same vehicle based on which side of Steeles you live was a very hard sell.  

4. Scraping this in isolation was a bad idea. The revenue should have been replaced, by a hike in residential property tax.

5. MikeB, maybe Smitherman would have done it also if he was elected. I’d hardly consider George a worthwhile mayor. The problem here is not necessarily Ford (one of the few, if not the only time, I’ll use that phrase) – it’s the taxpayer.
   You are correct to suggest that such a tax should be paid regardless of boundaries.

   But, congestion is a fact of life south of Steeles right now. Nobody else in Ontario will gladly give Toronto any money to address the congestion, so right or wrong, this tax was very much needed. Yesterday, I sat in traffic on Sheppard and I got to thinking that this could be the norm from now on.

6. During the mayoral campaign, didn’t Pantalone also say he regretted voting for the Vehicle Registration Tax? Yeah… but I guess that’s one of those inconvenient truths.

7. Congestion…..recently while carpooling to work I recalled a recent episode of Trashoplis that described a situation that London faced 150 years….

   I hope you all can see where I am going with this analogy and how it can be applied to Toronto’s congestion situation…
   I wonder what will be the moment that Toronto realizes the urgency of the problem, what will be our “Great Stink” moment.

   too out there? I liked the analogy.

   During the early 19th century the River Thames was an open sewer, with disastrous consequences for public health in London, including numerous cholera epidemics. These were caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Proposals to modernise the sewerage system had been made during 1856, but were neglected due to lack of funds. However, after The Great Stink of 1858, Parliament realised the urgency of the problem and resolved to create a modern sewerage system.

8. Yup, that was one of the things that prevented progressives from being truly excited about Pantalone’s mayoral campaign. Bad policy is bad policy, no matter who proposes it.

9. I’m with Glen on this one. The tax needed to go, but Ford is leaving a hole in the budget which needs to be filled.

   What is funny is that we tax cigarettes so that the people who use them can receive quality health care once their health begins to worsen. With the VRF we saw the removal of Metropass parking, removal of traffic lanes for bikes and streetcars, discussion of tearing down the Gardiner Expressway, etc. The only real improvement we saw was the resurfacing of some roads, and that was with stimulus money – which if Miller had his way, would have been used entirely for new streetcars while Steeles Ave degraded into a dirt road.

10. I’d tried to put forward some facts about car costs and subsidies/externalities to Councillors ahead of the vote citing five older studies that found a range of costs between $1,000 and $4,600 per car per year – not all of which were on the civic level. But cars cost us – yet aren’t seen as being subsidized.
    So it’s pretty disappointing that a useful source of diversified revenue is not goint to be collected to address pinko issues like budget shortfalls, extra cops, property tax freezes, debt retirement and road repairs.
    We should encourage/thank those 6 that voted for keeping the tax; and work on others to try to get them to change their minds – realizing that some are far too carrupted/gone to look at this issue somewhat objectively, as useful as cars can be sometimes, and as costly as they are to run and operate.
    But the elephant pooping in our living room has four wheels…

11. Hamish, post your findings here, so we can all have a look.

12. @hamish, my biggest problem is that it was in Toronto only. One could live on the other side of Steeles or 427 and be exempt. If it covered all the GTA municipalities then I would support it.

    For the record, northern Ontario pays half what we pay in southern Ontario.