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

Toronto Council should not renew the licenses for the degrading exotic dance bars on Bloor St. These strip joints subjugate women to entertainment status, are magnets for prostitution and drug related crimes, and reduce the quality of life and safety of everyone living in the area near Bloor street between Lansdowne and Dufferin.

Pearson Rail Link Plan Flawed

The proposed rail link from downtown to Pearson has some serious flaws which should be addressed before the project proceeds. First, to reduce noise and air pollution the trains should be electrified, even if at increased cost. Second, 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. Third, the project should be publicly-owned and operated rather than by private interests. And finally 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.

End funding for religious education.

The GPO will end funding for religious education, merging the Catholic system with the Public system. At the same time we will expand and diversify the public system by offering funding to independent, non-religious schools. The objective is to maintain a wide variety of learning styles and community diversity in a loose, flexible system, without expensive redundancy.

Everyone hates taxes, of course, but since they are unavoidable Ontario should at least choose taxes that are good for the economy and for the Earth. The HST is neither.

Like the GST and the soon to be absorbed Ontario retail sales tax, the HST will continue to tax consumer items. Taxing goods raises the cost of products, discouraging people from buying what they want and need, knocking jobs out of the economy. And taxing sales hits both green and grey products equally, adding costs to people who shop green. A better way would be to apply a levy on resource use, energy and pollution at source in order to incent manufacturers to use resources and energy more efficiently, plus do more value-added, labour-intensive production (more jobs). Levying resource use rather than taxing sales is beneficial for the planet and the economy.

Taxing services is equally counter productive. The 8% PST on top of the 5% GST means a 13% dead weight tax on service providers. Bad for the planet because service jobs -- like hair cuts, bicycle repairs, internet access fees, legal services, home renovation -- are green jobs that require few resources; exactly the kinds of jobs we want. Bad for the economy since it will kill many service jobs that the additional tax will render unaffordable.

The ecology-friendly and economy-friendly alternative would be to untax consumption and services altogether and generate needed government revenue by charging fees on the use of resources like oil, trees, gravel, water and land. Government revenue should come from the use and abuse of nature, not from the ingenuity and hard work of humans. Alberta and Alaska have no sales or services taxes since they generate sufficient revenue by collecting some of the economic rent of oil. Ontario doesn't have oil but we have some resources and we import many more.

Most importantly, land is Ontario's oil. Our main source of economic rent is the wealth that accrues to desirable locations. Land is a gift of nature which belongs to all Ontarians equally, yet the financial benefit of owning land goes mostly untaxed to its owners. Instead, "the royalties" from land should be collected to cover the cost of government services or returned to Ontarians equally as a citizen’s dividend.

The Ontario Liberals are implementing the HST without even a pretense of revenue-neutrality, it's a tax grab to help reduce the projected $18.5 billion deficit incurred from car company bailouts and lost tax revenue from manufacturing job losses. True, the harmonization will make collection more efficient, but this benefit will be negated by the dampening effect on the productive economy. The Liberals also intend to significantly reduce business taxes, which would make good sense if the shift was onto collecting economic rent, but their plan of shifting it onto goods and services will not realize any economic or environmental pluses.

The optimal way to invigorate the economy AND conserve nature is to untax consumption and services and instead finance government through fees and levies on the use and abuse of nature. When governments collect the “unearned income” or “economic rent” that accrues to resources, land, pollution, or community-owned assets like the EM spectrum, airport runway slots, or internet access, it removes the incentive for capital to invest in the speculative economy. (Speculation causes recessions and drives the liquidation of nature.) With this tax change, capital will move to the productive economy, conserving nature and creating resource-efficient, green jobs. This way everyone, including the Earth, wins.