No other municipality is dealing with the following:
- Decades old, failing transit infrastructure in need of upgrading, and a repairs backlog that is in the order of billions.
- Chronically over-congested transit system in desperate need of expansion.
- A very large transit system whose operating budget is practically entirely funded from the fare-box, regardless if fares are coming from 416 or 905.
- Massive backlogs in other infrastructure like Community Housing, also in the order of billions, that are competing for funds from Toronto's minimal sources of revenue.
Toronto's needs are on a totally different scale from the rest of the province, and even the rest of the country. And yet, even if you think Toronto isn't being hard-done by, well from my perspective at least the rest of the province seems to make a sport of it every election season.
Look, if you wanna blame Mike Harris for how he put Toronto in this untenable position with the unfair double-punch of downloading and amalgamation, I'm right there with you. First in line.
but let's talk straight:
-Toronto's first mayor's most significant policy was a three-year property tax freeze
-David Miller was different, getting COTA from the province as well as funding for stuff like Transit City. Good for him.
-The next mayor scuttled much of that, winning election by promising to reduce property taxes to the rate of inflation or lower, scrapping the Vehicle Registration Tax and (though he failed) eliminating the Land Transfer Tax
-John Tory has similarly pledged to keep prop tax increases below the rate of inflation and has refused to restore the VRT. I give him points - very sincerely - for what he just tried to do but ultimately the tolls and hotel tax were ways of generating revenues by passing the buck to people who were not Toronto taxpayers/voters.
What I take from that is Toronto voters don't understand or don't want to deal with all your bullet points. They want more for less.
So, as much as Toronto is unfairly in a poor position, Torontonians need to own how much of it is their own making. Because a lot of it is. I'm all for helping Toronto, pooling resources and so forth but if Tory doesn't want to be treated like the boy in short pants, let's see successive years of 5% tax increases, real investment in community housing, daycare etc., a stop to endless transit and wasting money on dumb projects like the Gardiner Hybrid, a pledge to restore the VRT and otherwise take advantage of every COTA taxing power, a stop to announcing unfunded megaprojects, like Raildeck Park, and leading an honest discussion with taxpayers - as he did when head of Civic Action - that you cannot have expanded TTC and improved TCHC facilities when your costs go up at the rate of inflation and your taxes stay below it.
It's a doubled-edged sword.
Well, when transit has been offered as a way to, for the lack of a better phrase, "buy votes", are we surprised with an outcome that is utterly illogical? It would be so easy for the province (or even the Feds) to drop in an say, we will pay for x here, without considering the impact on y because they are frankly a) not threatened in the latter jurisdiction and b) capacity issue of what is a local system is not "their problem". That has got to change. ...This is a failure of transit planning and leadership - heads should roll over this one.
Totally agree. That's why we need an independent (but properly constituted and democratic) transit authority. Otherwise, this will never change and our actual priorities will never funded as such.
That's why, the specifics of tolls aside, last week was so frustrating. If a pol with the power to make change, who KNOWS what change needs to take place, cowers in fear of the electorate....Then there's no one else to count on.