Has your income increased by 17% over the past two years?
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If so, congratulations. In Toronto you’ll need it.
Following a huge 9.5% property tax increase last year Mayor Olivia Chow and budget chief Shelley Carroll announced a 6.9% property tax increase this year.
This year’s total is comprised of a 5.4% plus the 1.5% increase in the city building levy for capital expenditures on transit and housing.
That is a compounded two year total — with tax on tax — of 17%.
Carroll said, “A budget is a reflection of our shared priorities.”
By “our priorities” she means everyone at city hall. They may or may not be the priorities of the people who will pay the freight.
Libraries will be open seven days a week. They cancelled overdue fees and in a city with more libraries per capita than possibly any city in North America, how is that a priority when the city is bleeding money?
TTC fares are frozen. A third of the people on the TTC are not from Toronto. Fare evasion is rampant. Why should Toronto homeowners, and by extension renters, pay more for that?
Pools will be open longer. Is that a priority over housing, policing and a well managed budget?
Chow says renovictions will be stopped. She said she would be “turning them into affordable housing.”(What does that mean? Seizing the houses from the owners?)
The landlord and tenant act, which deflects to the tenant, is already one of the reasons we don’t have the housing we need. Chow’s move to further empower tenants over landlords is a disincentive to building and renting.
Eight thousand more kids will get mid morning food at school, with more to come, and 31,000 kids will be fed in a summer program.
Where is the program to determine why parents are not feeding their children? That’s child abuse.
Chow took a moment to parrot the line that “diversity is our strength.”
No it isn’t. It pits group against group and solves nothing. If you want to have Bok choy one night and a chalupa the next, fine. Share what is great about cultures. But diversity as a political agenda is dividing and damaging. We see it on our streets every day now.
Chow said Toronto has the most shelter beds in the nation.
Seventeen per cent of people applying for housing assistance are not residents of Toronto. Do something about that and drop the sanctuary city designation.
But once again Chow, Carroll and the rest ignored the huge budget busting elephant in the hall.
As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Cardus, and others have pointed out, Toronto keeps overpaying on construction projects, by $350 million a year. The reason, in many cases, is that only union-affiliated firms, off a cozy list of City Hall friendly companies need apply.
The Financial Post wrote, “The city’s deal with favoured unions means construction companies that are otherwise qualified to bid on municipal construction projects can’t do so, simply because their employees have chosen to organize themselves differently. Fewer bidders means less competition. Less competition means higher construction prices for taxpayers.”
That’s over a $1 billion every three years. See how a budget can be balanced? It doesn’t even take a lot of brains; it just takes will.
Whose palm is greased to keep that cartel alive?
Or is it just careless, lazy, incompetence?