Southern Ontario Cities:A Pig-Eats-Pig World

Happy Easter to everyone who graces these parts of the internet! I hope that you and your family had a delightful weekend of reflection, celebration and fellowship.

---

I just got back from a visit to my parents’ place this weekend, and got to read the “local”, Toronto-owned newspaper. To keep itself from the criticism that it is completely unconnected from the city it claims to serve, the paper will throw in the occasional reference to the city of Hamilton here and there along with the stories it runs in its “local” section. Today’s example was on how the city council in Hamilton was mulling over service changes for the coming fiscal year. One issue the city is upset with this year is that it feels “ripped off” that Ontario’s 2007 budget will allow the regions surrounding the city of Toronto (York, Peel, Halton, among others…) a break on the money it previously paid for Toronto’s social services via the province because of the feeling that these regions’ citizens cost the City of Toronto through their frequent visits. Hamilton was left out of this break, hence the resentment.

Down in Hogtown, Mayor David Miller is moving full-steam ahead with his new “revenue tools” that will tax Jays’ games, alcohol and dot the Toronto landscape with toll roads in order to get the rest of Ontario to pay for Toronto’s roads too when they use them. One Toronto city councillor recently inferred that this latest measure was on the table because the rest of the province was freeloading by using the Ontario capital’s roads.

These are but two of the examples of how Ontario’s regions and municipalities are currently in a war with each other to see if they can get the rest of the province to pay more money into their area via provincial and local taxes than they pay out to the rest of Ontario. I would suggest that this is just like the provincial tug-of-war that every Prime Minister has to wrestle with each year, but it is far worse because the Peter that various mayors and councils are robbing to pay Paul are far closer than half-a-country away saints that we see federally.

No one has yet bothered to mention that both Toronto and Hamilton have benefitted greatly from the forced charity of the rest of Ontario, especially the former. As I mentioned above, Toronto used to get money from its immediate neighbours becuase of the presumed cost that commuters burden Toronto with; no one ever figured though that Torontonians might also be costing places like Mississauga, Burlington or Brampton though! Toronto, because it has roughly 25% of the provinical seats in the legislature, also never has an issue at the end of the day in getting extra money whenever it comes, cap-in-hand, to Queen’s Park. Even when a Toronto rep. is confronted with the obvious imbalance between the money the province puts into Toronto and the far smaller amount coming out of the city, they crassly suggest that this scam is only natural since Toronto is the “economic engine” of Ontario. Forget that Miller and his socialist commards will kill all buisness in Toronto as we know it or that places like Waterloo, Nepean or Burlington are housing more and more of the province’s industries and buisnesses; what about the fact that what Toronto thinks is *its* buisnesses actually reside in the areas around it with a fraction of its tax rate. Places like Mississauga, Brampton, Ajax and Pickering are where you are finding the economic growth in the GTA these days. Etobicoke and North York used to be in this category too, but ever since they were sucked into Toronto’s uncompetitive tax and spend system in 1998, they too have seen a dramatic decrease in buisness that didn’t have to be in Toronto proper.

If cities, led by Toronto’s example, don’t soon learn to live within their means, and to have the decency to pay their own bills instead of asking the town down the street to, we’ll see the mild recession that Ontario is going through turn into an all-out long-lasting decline in economic performance. Buisness goes where costs are the cheapest. With the constant war by Ontario cities to pick the pockets of taxpayers clean, we’ll soon find that Michigan, New York, and even Quebec will be more attractive for our job-creating companies to reside in. Ontario cities should only be involved in the services they have to be for local benefit; the rest of us who visit from time to time will get along quite nicely without an extra park in eastern TO!