When Olivia Chow was running for mayor of Toronto last spring, reporters were always asking her how much she planned to raise taxes. It is a natural question for any politician vying to hold office and an obvious one for Ms. Chow, a veteran of a party, the New Democrats, that has a reputation for being free with taxpayers’ money.
The previous mayor, John Tory, a Conservative, had always pledged to keep annual property-tax increases at or below the rate of inflation. His opponents on the left accused him of starving the city government. Toronto, they said, had much lower taxes than many other Ontario cities. Did Ms. Chow agree? Was she going to take a different path than Mr. Tory and bring in a big tax hike?
Ms. Chow was reassuring. When her campaign opponents accused her of plotting to hit residents with a huge increase, she laughed it off. She knew that, with inflation way up, ordinary people were having trouble making ends meet. Even renters would suffer from a big hike because landlords would just pass the cost on to them. Any increase on her watch would be “modest,” a word she used over and over through the campaign.
Put your hand up if you consider 10.5 per cent modest. That is the number that appeared this week in the first proposed budget of Ms. Chow’s tenure. City hall said it could even go as high as 16.5 per cent if Ottawa fails to deliver a big chunk of money to help the refugee claimants who have flooded Toronto’s shelters.
Ms. Chow cannot use the usual excuse of newly elected politicians and say she had no idea things were this bad. Toronto was already in the soup when she was campaigning for office. Inflation was making it more expensive for the city to deliver services. The transit system was struggling with a drop in fare revenue leftover from the pandemic. The city faced a budget hole of $1.5-billion.
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Ms. Chow could have levelled with voters. She could have said: Look, sorry, but we are in big trouble here and I am going to have to ask you to pay more to keep the city in the kind of shape I know you expect. Her rivals would have cried aha!, but voters would probably have elected her anyway. With a well-known name, a long record and no major opponent, she was the prohibitive front-runner right through the campaign. Voters might even have given her credit for her candour if she had simply told them to brace themselves.
She did nothing of the sort. Instead, she told them not to worry their little heads about their taxes going way up. She knew they were hurting already. She felt their pain. She couldn’t say just what the tax increase would be if she were elected, but, ya, modest, just modest.
Ms. Chow was still trying to fudge things when the proposed budget came out this week, refusing to say whether she supported the headline-grabbing 10.5 per cent figure produced by budget officials.
This does not bode well for her young mayoralty. Last month, she backed a nonsensical decision to remove the name of a long-dead Scottish statesman from a downtown square and call it after an obscure Ghanaian concept. Meet Sankofa (formerly Yonge-Dundas) Square.
Now she is trying to skate through a decision that will inflict the biggest tax increase since Toronto’s amalgamation a quarter century ago on taxpayers already bowed down by the rising cost of everyday life. Perhaps a substantial tax increase is inevitable, but Ms. Chow’s decision to soft pedal it from the beginning undermines her authority and credibility at a time when she needs it most.
It undermines democracy, too. Voters are fed up with politicians partly because so many of them say one thing and then do another. Justin Trudeau reassured voters when he first campaigned for prime minister that he would run only modest deficits for a modest period of time: three years. We have had deficits every year since, with more stretching into the horizon. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he would not touch the Greenbelt, then did (before being forced to backtrack).
Voter cynicism is not yet fatal. People are still willing to follow a leader who earns their trust, if they can only find one. It would have been a lot easier to sell Torontonians on paying higher taxes if Ms. Chow had been frank with them in the first place.
Marcus Gee