| Issues |
Self-funding InfrastructureA painless way for Toronto to fund new infrastructure – without raising taxes – is for the city to collect the rise in local land values generated by that actual infrastructure. The "Mink Mile" reconstruction (Bloor between Avenue and Church) is being financed this way, and serves as an excellent model for other city improvements. Many cities around the world fund their infrastructure this way. If infrastructure is beneficial and warranted, it will raise local land value by more than the cost of that infrastructure. When redevelopment or new infrastructure – like parks, transit, rec centres, schools, hospitals – make areas of town more desirable to live in or do business in, the increased land value should be collected to pay for that redevelopment or new infrastructure. This way traditional municipal taxes don't rise anywhere in the city. Normally the increased economic rent goes (untaxed) to the person or company that owns affected land, even though governments paid for the improvements out of the tax base. Taxpayers everywhere are unjustly expected to pay for improvements that only benefit the local land-owning minority. Self-funding infrastructure remedies this problem. Municipal Taxes To improve fairness, municipal taxes should be moved off building and onto land beneath the building. Assessing and taxing only land and ignoring buildings is called Land Value Taxation. LVT reduces sprawl since it encourages people to use land more efficiently or sell it to someone else. Exotic Dance Clubs on Bloor Strip joints subjugate women, reducing them to sexual entertainment status. The clubs are magnets for prostitution and drug related crimes, reducing the quality of life, property value, and safety of everyone living in the Bloor, Lansdowne and Dufferin area. Families don't want to live in this area because of them. Strip joints also take away the dignity of men. This industry assumes women have no intellectual, business, nurturing, artist, or governmental capacities. Ward 18 should not be a sacrifice zone where "respectable" people don't visit, respectable stores and restaurants don't open. Toronto Council should change the zoning to prohibit exotic dance bars on Bloor Street (House of Lancaster, Club Paradise), or anywhere else in this city. Ban on Hand GunsHandguns are used in about 150 deaths per year in Ontario. Toronto had 79 gun deaths including 52 with handguns in 2009. About four-fifths of Canadian firearms deaths were suicides. Countries that prohibit handguns have the lowest homicide and suicide rates. Canada's rate of gun homicide is 6.0 per 100,000 population, with handguns used in two-thirds of gun homicides. The USA has 62.4 homicides per 100,000. Japan, which prohibits handgun ownership, has the world’s lowest gun death rate of per 0.3 per 100,000. In England and Scotland handgun ownership is not allowed. The argument that legally obtained guns are only involved in a small number of homicides ignores the fact that all illegal guns were initially purchased legally but eventually were illegally sold or stolen. Toronto needs a ban on handgun sales, re-sales and transfers, an ongoing amnesty on handguns. The economic reason for baning hand guns is that the economic cost of gun deaths and injuries in Canada are estimated at $6 billion per year.
The proposed rail link from downtown to Pearson has some serious flaws which should be addressed before the project proceeds. 1. To reduce noise and air pollution the trains should be electrified; the higher increased upfront cost will be offset by operatioinal savings. 2. The trains should make frequent stops and be fully connected to local transit routes in Toronto, Malton and Georgetown with no extra fees above the local transit fare. 3. The project should be publicly-owned and operated rather than by private interests. 4. It should be financed not by federal, provincial or city taxes, but by collecting the rise in land values that it generates along the route and especially around the stops. The most efficient and fairest way to save some of Toronto’s underused schools is for Ontario to merge the Catholic and public boards into one school system. This long overdue reform would reduce catchment areas, allow for the optimal use of the best school buildings, and shorten travel times for students, reducing busing costs. Merging boards would eliminate the redundancy cost of running parallel systems. Remember, one third of the education budget is on municipal tax bill. Furthermore, giving all students access to all schools would end the divisive practice of dividing kids along religious lines. Funding education for only one religion is unfair to people of other religions, an Ontario historical anomaly twice criticized by the UN.
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