To: Toronto municipal voters
From: Ottawa municipal voters
Hello, Toronto. Ottawa here.
We know you're the centre of the Canadian universe, but listen up just once, because we in Ottawa have a message for you: Don't be duped as we were.
We have our own municipal election on Oct. 25, but, Toronto being Toronto, yours is getting all the attention. Breathless commentators are already reading provincial and even national portends into an election that hasn't even been decided. Rob Ford, the blustery, know-nothing populist has people thinking that the Tea Party has crossed the border, and the contagion will spread across the province, then the country.
Here's the deal, dear provincial cousins, based on our sad experience. When a candidate for mayor says he or she will freeze taxes, or balance the budget while cutting taxes, don't believe it. We saw that movie in Ottawa, and it wasn't a good one.
Four years ago, Ottawa elected an outsider, a millionaire businessman named Larry O'Brien. He was going to kick City Hall in the pants, bring business acumen to the place and freeze taxes.
Anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of municipal finance knew this couldn't be done. But the electorate, or at least a chunk of it, remained unfathomably gullible. His organizers crudely calculated that 40 per cent of Ottawa was Conservative (Mr. O'Brien was a big supporter of the Reform Party), 40 per cent Liberal and 20 per cent NDP. In a three-candidate race, they reckoned, they needed to rally the Conservatives. And what brings conservatives together? The lure of lower taxes.
So Mr. O'Brien spent the entire campaign on autopilot, repeating the same message hour after hour: Elect me, and I'll freeze your taxes.
Since his election, municipal taxes have risen by 14 per cent - 3.5 per cent a year, well above the inflation rate. Each year, just squeezing the rate down to an average of 3.5 per cent takes weeks of endless meetings.
Mr. O'Brien brought his self-described business acumen to the place, all right. He hired consultants to study City Hall. He got rid of staff. He tried to stare down the militant bus drivers' union, thereby putting the city through a miserable strike, but got only a few concessions. (Shades of Toronto's CUPE strike?)
He couldn't do what he promised, which is what his opponents predicted during the campaign and what anyone who knew a whiff about municipal finance understood.
George Smitherman, once a senior Ontario cabinet minister, knows better than to promise a one-year property tax freeze. A freeze today means even higher taxes tomorrow. But he's apparently spooked by Mr. Ford, who's going to eliminate two taxes but find sufficient savings at City Hall to keep the tax increase to inflation or less.
Neither of these promises is serious, just as Mr. O'Brien's wasn't four years ago in Ottawa. The police budget isn't going to be frozen, not when the police lobby and its media friends get going. Neither is that of the fire department. And just try closing a bunch of libraries to save money. Sure, fire some civil servants, but the savings are like the shavings of an iceberg against the entire city budget. Put off maintenance of sewers and water mains; that will just drive up deferred maintenance.
Toronto, like Ottawa, is now dominated by suburbs. They cost more to service than inner cities, especially but not exclusively for public transit. More serious, despite new taxing authority granted by the province, Toronto, like Ottawa, is dependent on the property tax, an unreliable form of revenue-raising compared with income or sales taxes. Not much a mayor can do about that.
Nor can someone in Ontario's weak-mayor, no-party system control city council. Mayors propose, but council disposes. A mayor can't do much about the province's beleaguered economy, or its huge provincial deficits and burgeoning debt, which will require whichever party wins next year's provincial election to slash spending, likely to the detriment of municipalities.
So, Toronto, don't say you weren't warned by your provincial cousins.