No one likes paying taxes, but I think that for most people who can afford to buy a home in this city, property tax is still significantly lower than provincial and federal taxes, and arguably you get more for your buck (the money is spent closer to home, by definition).
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Yup. Anyone unhappy with property taxes should ask how Ford is spending their provincial income taxes.
5.4% property tax increase + 1.5% City Building Levy = 69‰ tax increase (nice)
People have to put behind them the Tory-Ford era of just cutting taxes and letting this amazing city rot. Nobody enjoys having to pay more, but if you know that these increases lead to actual positive impacts then people will be all ears.
But they're doing that by increasing taxes on wealth, capital gains, windfalls, luxury real estate, and income in the top 10%, right? They're totally not increasing taxes by even so much as one penny on working class citizens when there's so much obscene wealth controlled by a few.
Right?
But they’re doing that by increasing taxes on wealth, capital gains, windfalls, luxury real estate, and income in the top 10%, right? They’re totally not increasing taxes by even so much as one penny on working class citizens when there’s so much obscene wealth controlled by a few.
Municipalities in Ontario don't have the ability to tax those things.
In addition, property taxes on a large house are much higher than the property taxes on a condo. So even though they can't target wealth very well, the property tax is somewhat progressive.
I think a municipal sales tax is technically possible.
Not as it stands. Sure, the Ontario government could allow municipalities to introduce sales tax, and it has come up a bunch lately. However, municipalities are creatures of the province, and as such, new provincial legislation would be needed to allow municipal sales tax.
Offtopic but can you imagine Doug allowing TO to intro congestion pricing on the QEW?
As usual, Chow misleads the public - the biggest increase goes to the most generous ever public-union contracts, and I don't think that this will make TTC run better or the streets cleaner.
The services she mentions are run by people. There are no services without people. Good wages affect hiring, the quality of staff, retention and turnover. Why would that not affect the quality of those services?
Do we have to wait for inflation to outpace wages enough for people to start quitting the services, like nurses are, to realize that good pay is important?
Also weren't those workers have their pay increases capped to 1% per year during the post-COVID inflation period by Bill 124?
It just creates a two tier system where luck few who managed to get government jobs enjoy full benefits, indexed salaries, etc and the rest have to do precarious gigs at temp agency with night shift at minimum wage. If so called "socialists" cared about ALL working people, I would have less problems with this. Another problem is that a lot of government services like TTC are very expensive, but also very inefficient - I don't know if you use TTC and were able to use public transport in other countries - we get charged premium prices for subpar services.