Let cities fend for themselves

A city-based tax could be the answer

Commentary from Larry Solway

  My friend Richard Thomas asked me a tough question: "What reason does Toronto have to exist?"
  Richard is an environmentalist who lives a happily bucolic life on his farm near Burk's Falls, in what is commonly called Toronto's "cottage country."
  He raises goats, sheep, and Muscovy ducks. Running as a Green he beat the stuffing out of the NDP in the Parry Sound Muskoka riding by-election. (His overtures to the NDP were ignored.)
 

"Why should someone in Red Deer care about what happens in Calgary? They don't. They won't."

  "Why Toronto? You pollute the air. You create mountains of garbage and you want the rest of Ontario to pay for your waste, mismanagement, homelessness and gridlock."
  The answer reflects my city-centric, city-loving mindset about the urban landscape: Only a big city has the critical mass to support everything from fine restaurants to universities, to museums, symphony orchestras and big league sports. The City has colour and noise. It has variety and excitement. It has street people and rich people and people of colour and a multitude of food smells and sounds. It breathes. It pulses. So why is it treated like a begging irritation in an otherwise happy, prosperous, content, even smug agricultural country?
  Governments still look at cities as if it were the 19th century and the country was agricultural and most people did not live in cities. Much of what we do is still based on an agricultural model, including the way school years are scheduled. But that's another issue.
  The institution called a city still exists as nothing more than a creature of the province. Even its voting population does not reflect the one person, one vote principle. Because, as we know, one voter in a rural riding in Saskatchewan has the clout of almost two voters in, say, Scarborough.
  You can't have a city unless you nourish a city. It is time that the politicians, including the five big city mayors who met recently in Winnipeg, stopped begging or bullying senior levels of government for more handouts. It is the very quality of that "begging" that leads my friend Thomas to question our right to exist and prosper.
 

The big city is a political orphan

  Survival of the city must not lie in the largesse of either Ottawa or the Province. They can give or they can take away. They can pull strings and demand obedience. They can have us cowering meekly asking for "more" like poor little Oliver Twist, or fulminating madly like the helpless mayor of Toronto who confuses shouting and boosterism with ideas and progress.
  We have been orphaned politically. While voters in big cities should and do have ample political representation, other Canadians have even more representation. They are adamant that their "hard-earned tax dollars" will no go to keep those overcrowded sewers of iniquity and welfare mothers living in luxury. Why should someone in Red Deer care about what happens in Calgary? They don't. They won't.
  We must stop begging. Start taking. It is not enough to plead our case by defining the big city as the "engine" of the economy. It is time to stop the endless and fruitless insistence that we pay most of the taxes and get the least of the revenues. It is also time to stop bleating about a share of gas taxes or toll roads to pay for transit.
  It is time for us to demand that the province and the federal governments devolve certain areas of taxation (or portions thereof) to the municipality. As it stands we have no tax collecting ability, aside from the foolish and burdensome property tax. Even that is totally skewed with rental properties and businesses paying far too much. You can't simply tweak property taxes to solve the problem.
  Only through devolution of tax collecting rights will the problem be solved. The federal government long ago devolved certain tax rights to the provinces, rights like income and sales tax. Now it's time for the city to tax.
  There are two ways: the first is to allow for the city to collect a portion of income tax from people living within its borders. To avoid the selfishness of neighbouring satellite communities, the tax would have to be collected from a wider area. For Toronto it would have to be the GTA. There could be no tax disparity between Vaughan (which has shamelessly promoted itself at the expense of Toronto) and the larger city.
  The second way is with a new sales tax formula under which the city would collect somewhere between one and two percent of the sales tax collected within its border.
  In both tax ideas the people who file income tax and sales tax returns would deduct the amount paid municipally from the amount owed to the federal and provincial governments. That's not a new formula. And it would not result in a net increase of taxes for business or individuals.
  Of course it would mean that the senior levels of government would be foregoing certain revenues, but it would then be their choice whether or not they would institute a general tax increase to cover the shortfall, or reduce the amount they now dole out to cities.
  We must be masters of our own fate. The mayors and Jane Jacobs understand that. They know that cities are not what they were. They all recognize that cities are unique, distinct, and the matrix around which the economic, social, and political future of the country must be built.

Posted: June 11, 2001

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