The fact of the matter is that efficiencies will never be enough to build transit. Toronto has an operating budget of only $14 Billion. In the completely unrealistic case that we find 5% efficiencies, we would only save $700 Million per year.
Hmmmm. The province of ON's budget is $126Billion. If they found just 2% efficiencies, the Prov would have more cash for transit than their trying to take from us. Heck, just 1% in efficiencies gets us 3/4 of the transit cash we need.
I'm not against tolls, but considering all day daycare will cost 1.5 billion a year, and we didn't have to add a tax for it (even though we were running a deficit then, just like now), it makes me very skeptical. It's not like we just ran out of money when Wynne showed up, we've been broke for far longer than that.
Thanks to McGuinty, the liberals have too much baggage at this time to be asking for another tax. Interest on our debt is now $11 billion a year thanks to him. Maybe McGuinty should have thought of all this before coming out with the Green energy act, eHealth, Ornge, and bribing the locals (gas plants) for two seats during an election. No one has any faith in the province to act wisely - and for good reason!
If the lib's actually paid attention to the recommendations Drummond made in his report, and seriously started looking at ways to save money, people would be more open to tolls/taxes. But, considering Wynne's already stated, there's no more savings to be found (ummm, the Drummond report had tonnes of recommendations with only very few being used so far) she's shot herself in the foot at the starting line. Next month's budget should be very interesting.......