• Rickshaw owners back in driver’s seat [ National Post ]
• Who want the city to hike taxes? [ Toronto Star ]
• No new taxes, city told [ Toronto Sun ]
• Rowdy kick-off to tax talks [ National Post ]
• Chorus of boos from small business greets city’s proposal for eight new fees [ Globe and Mail ]
• West-end property owners in a stew about rabbits [ Toronto Star ]
• New smog-alert system coming [ Globe and Mail ]
• Cyclists have grate expectations [ Toronto Star ]
• Applications filed to build eight new reactors in Ontario [ Globe and Mail ]
photo by Easternblot
8 comments
Thanks for the compilation, some useful info in the Globe article, and I don’t normally bother with the Globe unless it comes my way.
Taxes on concerts and sporting events?
Why doesn’t the city just take over Ticketmaster’s business? Ticketmaster currently charges an extra 50% of the ticket price as a “convenience” charge, which is beyond ridiculous. There is nothing “convenient” about Ticketmaster’s “service”, and they pretty much have a monopoly on internet & phone ticket sales in the city. If the city were to take over and charge 20% of the face value of tickets sold in Toronto, that would be a huge windfall for the city, and ticket buyers would be happy too.
The numbers that the star and the sun report for the proposed taxes are completely different.
The star reports:
5% alcohol
$40 vehicle
5% cigarettes
.5 % land transfer
The sun reports:
1% alcohol
$10 vehicle
1 % cigarettes
.1% land transfer
What annoys me is that the “easiest taxes” are likely to be the first laid but they are the least fair. Why should people be punished for buying a home if they are renting, or for trading up?
Why should a transit user like me who owns a car be taxed at the same level as someone who drives a single occupant car into downtown to a parking spot his company probably pays for?
One thing the City should do immediately is make delivery of Social Services an armslength agency like the TTC and Toronto Hydro, so the costs involved and the shortfall of provincial support is more obvious.
What Toronto and other cities need is a base tax that grows with the economy, which property taxes do not do.
Why isn’t a share of my income or the sales taxes I pay staying in the city? I don’t mind if most of my Federal taxes end up in Quebec or that my Provincial taxes go to support Northern Ontarian communities, but why is it so hard for those “higher” level of governments (who I do not feel connected at all) to give a small share of my income and sale taxes to stay in my city?
And why is the property tax paying for social programs that are the Province’s responsibility? I know they either despise us or take us for granted, but when are the people in this city are going to say enough?
One last thing, it is time to get rid of many jobs in City Hall. There are too many bureaucrats that are useless and incompetent. I respect the garbage collector and the firefighter, but my experience when dealing with city hall for services has always been atrocious. The guy that is hunting for illegal billboards around the city has been through a lot of crap with city staff. I say fire them all!
We are such a bunch of pushovers…
Mark >> from what I understand, land transfer taxes would have little impact on residential home owners. It would be the large land owners (ie developers) who swap properties and move ownership around, etc. I could be wrong but that is how it was explained to me by folks “in the know.”
property taxes and land transfer taxes are both supposed to represent a percentage of a property’s market value. this should be good news for governments, because the market value of homes in the GTA has been growing a lot faster than the economy for the last decade.
but, how do you know what the market value of a property might be? well, it’s easy for land transfer taxes: you calculate the tax on the basis of an actual sale transaction.
it’s not so easy for property taxes, which are levied annually. there is an entity responsible for assessing property values for property tax purposes, called the municipal property assessment corporation (MPAC). it has done such a terrible job lately that the provincial government has suspended its ability to make new assessments for two years. what do you think will happen to property values in the GTA over a two-year period?
so, if the object of the exercise is to get more money for the municipal government, part of the solution is to fix MPAC.
No one likes to pay taxes, but the City of Toronto desperately needs money and I don’t think that there is any alternative to David Miller’s “revenue tools”. I would prefer a municipal income tax, because it would be more progressive, but the province won’t allow that. Currently, the city’s primary source of revenue is the flawed property tax system, and it is not enough money. We can’t complain to the provincial or federal governments, because they are unwilling to raise taxes to pay for transfer payments to municipalities. It is also not an option to simply cut “perks” like free golf for city councillors, because these perks cost trivial amounts of money and cutting them won’t balance the budget.
Toronto barely has enough money to balance its current budget, let alone attack the large backlog of infrastructure repairs or build major new infrastructure such as the Transit City light rail program. I would rather pay higher taxes to pay for investment in infrastructure, which will boost our economy in the long term, than watch our city crumble.