Taxes
Can we have a serious conversation about taxes? The city is becoming more and more unaffordable, with the cost of housing, food, internet, and other private services. But is it public services we want to cut?
If we want clean water from the taps in our houses, only treated sewage released into the lake, storm water controlled to eliminate flooding, clean streets in good repair, no traffic congestion, fast clean transit service, great libraries, firefighting, ambulance, police, and social services, we have to pay what it costs.
“Anyone who wants to make cuts to taxes can only be taken seriously if the
suggest a corresponding cut to services”
And let’s not use “lower taxes” as a cover for cutting some service we don’t like. Anyone who wants to make cuts to taxes can only be taken seriously if they suggest a corresponding cut to services. And always put things in perspective. For example, the cost of renaming four city locations including Yonge-Dundas Square, at $2.7 million, was practically a rounding error in the overall city budget of $17 billion per year. In contrast, the police budget is roughly 25% of our taxes. And the idea that we have had a tax freeze until Mayor Chow came along is also untrue. My taxes have gone up year over year because the value of the property increased. Now that land value is not going up, the tax rate is going up. Yes, we need to pay for inflation, but the City has $8 billion in reserves. This is like savings. Some of it is from operating budget surpluses, which is typical. But half of it is from development charges, which are meant to pay for expanding service when we build new buildings. We have built the new buildings but have not expanded the services.
Some of the things we need to do:
Continue with the citizen budgeting process.
Start and complete the reserve fund projects a lot faster.
Lobby the provincial government to add housing to the list of potential uses of reserve funds.
Consultations for the 2025 city budget have already begun and there is a survey where you can have your say.
We have been proposing symbolic gestures to manage the budget, and you can see the results all around you.
The way that we respect taxpayers, which is all of us, is to spend the money so that we get the results that we want!
