As the budget process at Toronto City Hall crawls forward, with another round of the budget committee’s meeting today and then the All-Singing All-Dancing* Extravaganza of public deputations on the proposed budget tomorrow and Thursday, here are a couple of quick notes—not about what we’re hearing, but about what we’re not.1. WHAT DO WE WANT TO AFFORD?
When looking at any of the $88 million in proposed service and program cuts, or at suggestions for implementing new user fees (yesterday, fees for DVD borrowing at libraries and a $2-per-person admission price to public pools were tossed around), the debate is being framed by Mayor Rob Ford, Budget Chief Mike Del Grande and their allies as a matter of “what can we afford?” The premise here is that the city is broke, and while it would be “nice to have” public pools and libraries that were freely available to the general public, and “nice to have” shelters that ensure homeless senior-citizen mental-health patients do not freeze on the street, we simply have no money to do everything we’re doing now.
The opposition to the proposed cuts when we get to particulars (as we are now) often zooms in on need: Homeless senior-citizen mental-health patients will freeze on the street if the shelters close, impoverished schoolchildren will be illiterate without access to books and computers at the library, etc. The argument often is, or becomes, “we realize money is tight, but we absolutely need these services to avoid disaster.” And so then, because of absolute need, there’s a reason put forward to spend money from reserves (or from the surplus from this year’s budget) or raise taxes by some small, incremental amount.
What’s missing from the conversation is the question of what we want. And that’s really a key question, because in fact the city is not “broke.” The city as a whole is quite affluent compared to other cities in Canada, North America and the world: home to giant, profitable banks and real-estate developers and businesses of all kinds; and home to a very large middle and upper class of people who have found the resources to drive average housing prices north of $400,000 and have had enough money left over to keep dozens of pet spas and hundreds of organic farmers’ markets in business. We are home to a large population of poor and almost-poor people too, of course. But as a group, the residents of the city of Toronto are not broke, not relatively and not absolutely.
And the City of Toronto, as a government organization, only faces a tight financial position because of choices our politicians—federal, provincial and municipal—have made about taxation and spending priorities. Yes, it appears when you look at the current balance sheet that money is tight. But as I wrote last week, much of that tightness is caused by tax-cutting decisions we made last year. There’s not really any argument to be made that we had to cut taxes. Our property taxes are already lower than those of other cities in the GTA. In fact, many people argued the opposite, that we could not afford to cut taxes, because the city was in a tough financial position. That claim to necessity proved hollow.
We wanted lower taxes, and so we cut taxes. (Incidentally, the city’s residents themselves do not seem to be nearly as averse to tax increases as politicians think they will be: the Board of Trade, representing the business community, has repeatedly called for new revenue for the city in the form of new taxes and fees, and a survey conducted for the Toronto Real Estate Board that we can guess was commissioned more or less to support repealing the land-transfer tax shows a small majority of Toronto respondents support raising property taxes. If those two relatively conservative organizations show support for tax increases, you know the potential-tax piggybank isn’t quite empty.)
Now that we’re talking about the possibility of cutting services, the claims that we cannot afford to keep all the services the city offers are equally hollow. We should be asking ourselves what we want. Because if we want to keep all the services we have, we can do so. If we want to bring forward a whole slew of new services and programs, we can do that too. If we want to expand our transit infrastructure, we can. We just need to raise the money to pay for those things, either through property taxes, other taxes like the the vehicle registration tax which we cancelled last year, or user fees like road tolls or admission fees at pools. If we want to afford the services, we can afford them. If we don’t want to pay for them, we don’t have to. Either way, we can make a decision about what we want, and implement it. We do not need to do anything except what we, collectively, decide we want to do. (In theory, there are absolute limits to how high or low taxes can be, given the resources of the population and the service requirements forced on the city by the province. We are nowhere near either of those limits. )
2. HOW ARE WE MAKING TORONTO A BETTER CITY?
Whether you loved them or hated them, both David Miller and Mel Lastman framed nearly every issue in terms of how to improve the city. An Olympic bid would drive development and tourism and make Toronto more “world-class,” we heard from Lastman, while community development in poorer neighbourhoods and expansion of transit and bike infrastructure would make Toronto cleaner, safer, more fair, and more sustainable, we heard from Miller. In those cases, and in dozens of others, former mayors articulated the key goal as finding ways to make Toronto a better place in which to live, do business, or play.
The current discussion does not seem to even consider the question of improving the city. The mayor and the budget chief seem to accept as a premise that the city is going to get crappier and proceed to debate exactly how much or how quickly the crapification process should proceed. Many—though not all—of those opposing specific cuts pursue a line of argument something like “I understand we desperately need to make life in Toronto somewhat crappier, but this particular program cut is a pile of crap too far. Let’s pursue other, slightly less crappy ways to accomplish our goals.”
This is a problem. The goal of city government should be to make Toronto a better place. We should be able to assume that all sides are proceeding from the assumption that whatever they are proposing will improve life in Toronto. Improvements can take many forms: Things that lower the amount of suffering, create new opportunities, make life easier, make our culture more interesting and vibrant or make people wealthier are all making Toronto better. If you’re proposing something, tell me how it accomplishes one or more of those goals.
Tax cuts may be one way that life can get better for residents or business owners. (I, for one, did not notice any appreciable difference in my quality of life after the elimination of the Vehicle Registration Tax put a whole $1.15 a week into my pocket last year. Similarly, I am not likely to notice the $1.15 a week or so that this year’s property tax-increase will cost me. Your mileage may vary.) But tax cuts don’t exist in a vacuum. Is there some way that charging me and everyone else to use the public pool is going to make life better? Will cutting the level of services for HIV treatment and prevention programs make the city better? Will charging people to get movies from the library make the city better? Will raising development application charges and laying off city planners make doing business in Toronto better? Will closing the High Park Zoo make the city better?
In almost all those cases, I would argue that, in mostly small ways, those various cuts will make the city incrementally worse. And having established that this is a conversation about wants rather than needs, the question is: Do I want to pay something more than I do now—$2 a week? $5 a week?—in order to prevent that incremental worsening from happening? Will my city be a better place if I have $2 a week in my pocket to spend however I choose? Or will it be a better place if the city takes that $2 from me and offers unlimited community access to public pools and libraries, keeps pools and wading pools from closing, continues to operate things like the High Park Zoo, continues to provide all the public health programs and arts and community grants it does now, and continues to shelter all the homeless mental health patient senior citizens it does now?
The question looks loaded when it’s phrased that way. But these questions we don’t hear very often are legitimate: Is spending X dollars in raised taxes worth X level of services? What do we want to afford? Can we make the city a better place? And how do we do that?
* Well, there likely will be some singing and possibly some dancing. There will certainly be lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of talking.
Origin
Source: the GRID TO
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