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High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto

dunkalunk said:
I highly doubt that Wynne would take a line from the Harris playbook by selling off public assets. I do see a corporate tax increase as a real possibility though. I also see a 1-point increase in the HST, business parking levy, and HOT lanes on 400-series highways being serious possibilities. Hopefully, the province will also nudge Toronto to start tolling municipal highways.

Pie-in-the-sky is to legalize and then tax the hell out of marijuana, although I doubt that would happen on anything but a federal level.
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I think selling some asset is being considered.
1 pt of increase in HST, and I will definitely consider moving somewhere else. Ideally it should be 10%. It will be very unpopular and I doubt that's on Wynne's mind.
 
dunkalunk said:
Pie-in-the-sky is to legalize and then tax the hell out of marijuana, although I doubt that would happen on anything but a federal level.
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Hopefully the Feds would put it in the same category as alcohol, which would put it under Provincial regulation. It would be relatively easy for Ontario to control the sale of marijuana via the current LCBO outlets. Create an "MCBO" section within existing stores. It wouldn't come close to revenues from alcohol, but it wouldn't be an insignificant amount.

And I don't think it's that pie-in-the-sky. The Federal Liberals are in favour of legalization, no?
 
gweed123 said:
Hopefully the Feds would put it in the same category as alcohol, which would put it under Provincial regulation. It would be relatively easy for Ontario to control the sale of marijuana via the current LCBO outlets. Create an "MCBO" section within existing stores. It wouldn't come close to revenues from alcohol, but it wouldn't be an insignificant amount.

And I don't think it's that pie-in-the-sky. The Federal Liberals are in favour of legalization, no?
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I think it's high time it was legalized from a moral/social standpoint anyhow. If it could lend a hand in a bit of a financial pinch, then all the better right?
 
MrsNesbitt said:
I think it's high time it was legalized from a moral/social standpoint anyhow. If it could lend a hand in a bit of a financial pinch, then all the better right?
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Agreed. The fiscal effect would actually be two-fold: increased revenue from taxation, and decreased spending on policing of the drug trade (since legalization would cut it off at his knees). That money could either be put back into the general funding pot, or be redirected to other areas of the policing budget.
 
ksun said:
I think selling some asset is being considered.
1 pt of increase in HST, and I will definitely consider moving somewhere else. Ideally it should be 10%. It will be very unpopular and I doubt that's on Wynne's mind.
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The problem is that people's take home pay will be reduced quite a bit by the Ontario pension plan. Trying to raise the HST to 15% at the same time would hand the PCs a majority in 2018. It would probably be politically easier to raise the HST if there were no pension plan.

High speed rail simply is not going to happen because the government is short on money. If we are lucky then some sort of lower speed rail improvements will happen as part of the GO train expansion, as the government seems to have finally decided that GO expansion is the #1 priority (after wasting years with David Miller's flawed light rail proposals). High speed rail was simply another of Glen Murray's pipe dreams.

I suspect most projects except GO expansion and Eglinton will be endlessly delayed until 2020 or something ridiculous, or cancelled entirely, due to lack of funds.
 
innsertnamehere said:
No it isn't. Our credit rating would be destroyed if we were in that rough of shape. In reality we have a large amount of debt, but nothing dangerous that would require austerity.

If you can't see where the money will come from I would suggest you check out the budget, it outlined how and where the money comes from.
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The poor health of Ontario's finances have been greatly overstated. Is it great? No. But is Ontario going to become the next Greece? Absolutely not. Unlike Greece and those other Euro horror stories, Ontario has a growing tax base that should soon be able offset our spending without any cuts in spending from current levels. This is something that the numbers across all Ontario political parties agree with.
 
andrewpmk said:
The problem is that people's take home pay will be reduced quite a bit by the Ontario pension plan. Trying to raise the HST to 15% at the same time would hand the PCs a majority in 2018. It would probably be politically easier to raise the HST if there were no pension plan.

High speed rail simply is not going to happen because the government is short on money. If we are lucky then some sort of lower speed rail improvements will happen as part of the GO train expansion, as the government seems to have finally decided that GO expansion is the #1 priority (after wasting years with David Miller's flawed light rail proposals). High speed rail was simply another of Glen Murray's pipe dreams.

I suspect most projects except GO expansion and Eglinton will be endlessly delayed until 2020 or something ridiculous, or cancelled entirely, due to lack of funds.
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In which case I'd prefer an increase in HST than pension contribution. I could cut spending to offset the impact of the former, but can do nothing about the latter. The whole pension trouble should be reformed to the less generous side, not the opposite. People should take more responsibility preparing for retirement, and rely more on family support, rather than whining to the government about financial difficulty. Most people don't have enough money to retire only because they spent too much on things they don't really need when they were young (vacations, dinner with wine, now all the new tech gadgets, it all seems affordable when you have income + a few plastic cards, but what about the future). Frugality and providence seem to be a virtue that's largely forgotten in today's comsumerism culture.

I never believe for a minute this HSR will be built. We don't have the money and it doesn't make sense unless London is some sort of major population hub like Montreal or even Ottawa. Spending billions so that the half a million people can arrive Toronto 30 minutes sooner makes no sense - and it is not like Torontonians go to London that much... like for what?
 
TheTigerMaster said:
The poor health of Ontario's finances have been greatly overstated. Is it great? No. But is Ontario going to become the next Greece? Absolutely not. Unlike Greece and those other Euro horror stories, Ontario has a growing tax base that should soon be able offset our spending without any cuts in spending from current levels. This is something that the numbers across all Ontario political parties agree with.
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This. We're not Greece and we're not the 2007-8 USA either.

I still believe, like I posted the first time that this project was announced, that HSR to London on its own is overkill. I'd rather spend the cash on AD2W GO on all lines, with high frequencies and EMUs.

Now of course this project will probably remain in name only on the books for a number of years, and if the federal Liberals come to power next year, then maybe a deal to expand HSR into a London-Toronto-Ottawa sort of thing may get thrown around, and then (with a healthy infusion of federal dollars) I could see it starting construction. But as for now, it still seems pretty unlikely to me.
 
MrsNesbitt said:
I still believe, like I posted the first time that this project was announced, that HSR to London on its own is overkill. I'd rather spend the cash on AD2W GO on all lines, with high frequencies and EMUs.
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The Liberals promised both.....within 10 years.
 
Maybe not 10 years, but getting both within 12-15 is definitely going to happen. Look at the Liberal budget for freak's sake. It provides enough money for both projects through a dedicated revenue stream.

With respect to pensions, an expanded government pension is absolutely necessary given the changes in our society. Back in the 1960s when the CPP was introduced, it was adequate because:

1) Most people died only a few years after they retire. Now with higher life expectancy most people are living 20-30 years in retirement.
2) Most people had defined benefit work pensions back then. Nowadays most Ontarians have no work pensions at all.
3) The cost of living relative to income was a lot lower back then, meaning people were able to save for retirement. Nowadays, everything from housing to transportation to food is way more expensive than it used to be, and incomes haven't grown to match, so people have a lot less ability to save than they did back then. The new ORPP, with 50% of the money coming from employers & the high returns created by the provincewide combining, will offer people much more bang for their buck than private savings ever will.

The days of everybody having a work pension and a nice fat RRSP are gone. In the coming decades, relying solely on CPP & OAS for retirement security, which used to be a rare thing that only the very poor had to deal with, will become the norm... and the $12k a year income from CPP is nowhere enough to live off of.

For those who are lucky and are able to contribute regularly to their RRSPs, offset the ORPP by simply reducing your RRSP contribution by whatever your ORPP contributions are. You'll get more money off the ORPP than your RRSP ever will thanks to employer matching & the higher return rates created by combining savings. CPP gets investment returns of 10%-15% a year because it's so damn large, no middle-class citizen's private investments will ever get that.

I'm 21 years old and for people my age the ORPP is absolutely crucial. My generation is going to be forced to spend their entire working lives sinking the bulk of our incomes into rent/mortagages given how expensive housing is these days (housing costs have been increasing faster than incomes for decades now), plus paying off massive student debts created by the fact that the government only pays 50% of universities budgets these days. Whereas our parents had much cheaper housing relative to income, and went to school back when the government paid 80% of the costs. We're not able to save for retirement the way our parents did.

The ORPP is absolutely crucial for fixing the generational inequity crisis.
 
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The budget may list high speed rail and lot of other transit projects, it doesn't mean that they actually will get built. I think that the government is going to be forced to cut a lot more than Kathleen Wynne wants because Ontario will soon get hit with a credit downgrade. Borrowing massive amounts of money without raising taxes is a really foolish thing to do. Unless Ontario's economy drastically improves, since the GTA has one of the highest unemployment rates of a big city in North America now (much higher than most US cities now). The government can easily delay projects until 2020 (which is the same as cancelling them if they are controversial). As for the pension plan, I think that regardless of its merits (people saving too little for retirement), people will absolutely hate having their paycheques reduced to pay for it, and trying to raise taxes on anyone other the wealthy at the same time will make the Liberals unpopular. Wynne has stopped talking about transit taxes even though she has a majority and can implement it if she wants.
 
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