“The priority is helping people to move around the city better, more quickly, and dealing with the issues around lost productivity because of congestion,” she says. “We have not built transit seriously for a generation, probably two, and so we’ve never decided as a society to have an ongoing stream of revenue dedicated to transit. And I think we’ve demonstrated over the past two generations that we’re not going to build transit if we don’t have that revenue stream.” And, yes, she is in favour of such a stream. Amen.
Wynne is trying to help lead a growing parade here. The Toronto Region Board of Trade has come out in favour of big new investments in transit. Toronto City Council will likely continue debating the idea of using new sales taxes, gas taxes, parking fees, and development charges to build it. The provincial agency in charge of regional transit, Metrolinx, will be reporting on its own new proposed revenue sources in June. And federal NDP MP—and possible Toronto mayoral election frontrunner—Olivia Chow published an op-ed this week in the Star on the importance of a new “dedicated” stream of money for transit building.
As heartening as it is to see everyone in agreement, this fixation on a specific new transit-building tax is a little odd. That’s not typically how governments fund things: We have existing income, sales, and property taxes, after all, that provide a big pool of revenue. If the government wants to splurge on transit, they could just do so. And if they need more money for such projects, they can just raise existing taxes.
“New tools” and “a dedicated stream” are merely psychological gimmicks meant to make it look like people are chipping in for something specific. I asked Wynne—who sort of agreed it’s a gimmick (her word is “tactic”) meant to make higher taxes tolerable. “We have to wrap our minds around this,” she says. “[I agree] that the tenor of the times demands that people want to see where their money is going to go. People demand to know that if they’re putting an extra dollar somewhere, that it’s actually going to build [something].”
If there’s a general perception that the government wastes the taxes it collects—and in Ontario, that perception most definitely exists—then we can magically create new kinds of taxes that can’t be wasted (in theory, anyway). It’s an odd message, but its growing popularity suggests it might work. In this case, Wynne insists that people will see that money spent on transit. “We need a much clearer tracker of where the dollars go, of how much is raised through these levies or tolls or whatever it’s going to be, and how that gets applied to the projects that we need.”
The only hitch is that this plan could very quickly become an election issue for Wynne’s minority government. NDP leader Andrea Horwath has different ideas about where money should come from—she suggests corporate taxes for a start—and Conservative leader Tim Hudak wants funding to come from making government more efficient. If they vote against her, we could be back to square one. And of course, Mayor Rob Ford is set to make opposing new taxes for transit a plank in his platform next year. The public will likely get to vote on the question one way or the other soon enough.
So let’s not add ticker tape to the transit parade yet. We’ll be talking about this for some time to come. And if we ever get to the end of that exhausting conversation, we’ll have to start figuring out how to fund the operating expenses of our shiny new transit system. It’s a good thing we’ve decided this is our favourite subject, because all this talk is just the beginning.
Original Article
Source: thegridto.com
Author: Edward Keenan
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