The two sides in the tax debate at city hall agree on one point: the province must move to take the crushing burden of social services off Toronto's books.
The anti-tax Case Ootes, for example, said in Monday's debate that the province has to "act responsibly and pay its bills instead of taking the deadbeat approach." The pro-tax Giorgio Mammoliti echoed: "It's the province that needs to pull up their socks."
And in a press conference yesterday, Mayor David Miller declared: "We've done our part as Torontonians (by levying new taxes). It's time that social service costs were uploaded."
Not true.....the city has not harmonized services, has not harmonized the workforce, has not got rid of redundant property that is presently under-utilized and become redundant under amalgamation, etc. and due to these failures by Toronto we cannot prove or disprove that doing so would have made the "downloading" revenue neutral. And lets not forget the province did pickup the education bill and gave the city large cash payments most of which were not repaid. Also let's not forget that it was the Chretein/Martin liberals cut back on transfer payments to the province.
What they were all referring to was the downloading of social services onto Toronto and the other municipalities by the Mike Harris government a decade ago. By city hall's calculation, that is costing Toronto $729 million this year – almost double the shortfall of $415 million that the new taxes are designed to address in part.
In their first term, Premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal government took steps to reverse some of the downloading.
Last summer, for instance, they announced a phased-in uploading of the share of disability and drug programs now borne by municipalities. That will save the city $38million in the coming year.
That is not going far enough or fast enough, says city hall, which wants the province to move now to upload all social programs. Spread across every municipality in Ontario, that would cost the province more than $3 billion.
There are two problems with this demand.
First of all, it assumes the province is awash in cash. It isn't.
Yes, the province recorded a $2.3 billion surplus last fiscal year (which ended March 31). But the outlook is for a surplus about one-third as big this year, and that forecast is based on assumptions for economic growth that now appear rosy.
Even if there is a large surplus, the province faces many competing demands for the money – to pay for improvements to health care, education, transportation, the environment, and so on.
The struggle for dollars, then, is not so much between the municipalities and some amorphous entity called "the province." Rather, it is between municipalities and hospitals or schools.
All that being said, Toronto's budget crisis cannot simply be ignored by the province – especially not by a government with 19 Toronto seats, eight of them held by cabinet ministers.
Indeed, some believe a secret deal has already been worked out between Miller and McGuinty, which would explain why the mayor remained relatively quiet on the subject during the provincial election campaign.
Both city hall and Queen's Park sources flatly deny there is a secret deal.
But that doesn't mean some accommodation can't be made in the coming months.
First the province wants to see the report of a provincial/municipal panel that has been studying downloading for the past 15 months. That report is due early next year.
Any solution emanating from the panel would have to be applied province-wide, however, and that would substantially increase the cost to the provincial treasury.
A more Toronto-specific solution that is being bandied about is the uploading of responsibility for the TTC to the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, a provincial agency.
The question is: Are the city's budget woes big enough to persuade the mayor and the councillors to surrender that turf?
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