Wow. A month of working on a reply (non-stop! For 5 minutes here and there; sometimes 10) and it's still not being addressed by the Urban Toronto Forum? Urban ... Toronto. And a forum for it. And a political forum too. I can out-do the Toronto Star.
Is anyone even from Toronto on this site? I thought Urban meant like ... urban. Not suburban like Mississauga, "Ontario" or "Canadians" from outside South Ontario at least, let alone the U.S. I wouldn't be on the Urban L.A. Forum unless topless women were posting pictures and even then, for 15 minutes at best. There are Urban Toronto beaver contests but not on this forum. I'm not sure where they are but I'm sure they're somewhere. Ask my wife. She probably knows.
Etobicoke and Scarborough are part of the City of Toronto. Still suburban but with no city halls like Mississauga has, no separate police force, public transit, ever as long as I've been alive, so they get to count as part of Urban. And Urban Toronto due to the amalgamation business.
Not whatever this semi-new "GTA" thing is supposed to be but Urban Toronto. And a forum. And it's no wonder urban Toronto is in such a mess.
So how about a real answer. Count the words if you can find no spine to deal with Urban Toronto as with Miller, the oh so
nice (when we need goons with crowbars to bust kneecaps) NDP mayor of Urban Toronto. I'm surprised he's not a member of this site.
Remember. April 23-24 we get to wonder once again why we even pay municipal taxes as we go out, with our bags from the Beer Store, to clean up the garbage of nothing that StatsCan will even bother with -- who is dumping this garbage? And why does Michigan take it and why do we have to pay to truck it to Michigan?
We could pay much less dumping it in Lake Ontario. And might as well given that nothing in this vast thing called "Ontario," no spent mining town looking for 30,000 or so jobs wants to bother, so dumping in Lake Ontario is the best option. We could cut taxes with that and cutting taxes is our only concern. Too bad about the consequences here due to the rest of this alleged province and "federation", so too bad about the consequences everywhere else.
Sorta like the spoiled little brats in NL. But we could haul "Canadian" flags to confederate mound, dump raw sewage on them on The Lawns, pour gas on them, lite them up and end up getting fined for it. And then contemplating what to do about that. Should we raise taxes, cut services or both? In Urban Toronto?
Just wondering what you people think about this. Apparently the province's finances are worse that they seemed this time last year. I wonder what would be the best way to go about fixing the current deficit problem.
Soundbytes are always best. Maybe a jingle. A song and dance would cost too much. They're only affordable during election circus act marketing campaigns, via donations.
"How to solve the problems of the Canadas in a soundbyte"
Big mushroom clouds would work if only we could afford them. Other than that, no soundbytes or any amount of bandages/bomb shelters are ever going to solve anything.
It's not "Ontario's" problem. "Ontario" has no problem at all generating all the revenues it needs, and tens of billions of dollars more every year to pay out (via the confederates) more to other governments per capita than the less than worthless, disaster area Ontario Liberals are left with of the taxes Ontario generates to blow (per capita) on tax increases and cuts to services, while still running up deficits. But what else anyone would expect from the Ontario Liberal Party is beyond me. Or even worse, the Ontario NDP. Though it really makes no difference if the Conservatives or Liberals (hopefully the Ontario NDP will remain an unofficial party forever until it gives up and disappears) try to run the economic, social, socio-economic so polical and everything else structural mess call "Ontario." It's the one and only jurisdiction that has always paid more into this "federation" than it's taken out of it (which means it owes zero of the federal debt; but it pays for the bulk of it anyway) and that's okay to an extent given that it has over 40% of the GDP of the Canadas. But it's not okay when other governments have more of our own money to spend (per capita; healthcare, education, public transit, affordable housing, law enforcement, fire services, paramedics, sewers, water supply, treatment plants, energy, all infrastructure is quite tied to how many people are using it all) than the dysfunctional Ontario government, due to a totally dysfunctional structure, have to spend per capita, out of the taxes Ontarians pay, to spend on themselves. And it's the case in every jurisdiction other than Alberta. Maybe Alberta. It pays out over a billion dollars less in taxes, the only ones that matter, never to be seen again, than the City of Toronto pays out in taxes never to be seen again.
And transfer payments are the end all and be all in federal subsidies to provinces/territories. The "Canadian" Wheat Board is federal but it only subsidizes the 4 provinces of the Western Canadas -- so it's not federal; it amounts to nothing but provincial subsidies. Ontario and Quebec are the only jurisdictions in the Canadas with their own law enforcement from top to bottom and bottom to top. Everything else uses this "RCMP" thing, which has to be split up and renamed so that we can see what is going to which provinces in subsidized law enforcement. There's the "FBI" end of the RCMP, which is truly federal. There's the "SS" end of the RCMP, which is truly federal. Whether the decorative units for the tourists are still around anywhere I have no idea. Toronto is the tourist capital of the Canadas and I've never seen one in my life other than on postcards. I lived in Ottawa for a few months and never saw an old "mountie" style RCMP anywhere there either. Perhaps they're up in the territories to greet all of the tourists that don't go there but if they still exist, they have to be separated out into another branch -- and also separated out in federal budgets. Then there are the Alberta Federal Police, B.C. Federal Police, PEI Federal Police, etc., for every jurisdiction but Ontario and Quebec. They have to be renamed and separated out in budgets so we can see the subsidies they're all getting that we're not.
There are shares of the federal debt, the largest expense of the federal government. Ontario doesn't owe a cent of it so get the numbers out on what does so that we can deduct that from the confederate taxes each jurisdiction pays out and see exactly what Ontario taxpayers are paying into a debt they don't owe a cent of.
There are many "federal" programs/institutions that are not federal at all. CBC TV/radio stations, a Crown corporation, you can look up where it makes money and where it doesn't. It makes money because it sells ad space and because someone is actually watching it/listening to the radio stations. The Extended Golden Horseshoe Area, as defined by Statistics Canada, has fairly dense (in world terms; extremely dense in "Canadian" terms) and diverse populations. It actually makes money in this area and enough to pay for all of the Ontraios and then some.
That'd be fine if it were a private corporation, spreading its profits around wherever it makes the most sense to. But it's not private. It's run like a private corporation, the feds don't tell it what to do, but it has to answer to them when it needs money to fund TV/radio stations in sparsely populated areas where ad space is worth next to nothing. That money amounts to provincial/territorial subsidies.
And there's all the duplication of federal departments/offices in every province and territory. If you're in Toronto just grab the telephone white pages, look to the blue (edged) government listings at the back because they don't even bother with separate sections for Municipal, Provincial, Federal. Just different categories then an M for municipal, P for provincial, F for federal, (Bil) for bilingual and under Aboriginal Affairs, first category, there are two Federal offices, bilingual, two provincial and one municipal. Pick one and dump the rest.
"Centralization," all of these stupid duplicated and triplicated (and worse) departments that are federal but in provinces and territories are costing federal taxes. Break it all down and let's see how much each jurisdiction is sapping out of federal taxes for "centralization."
On and on it goes before hitting the most expensive federal transfer: the Canada Health Transfer/CHT. Federal subsidies, per capita, to help provinces and territories pay the healthcare plans/programs they design themselves. B.C.'s is quite elaborate. Ontario's covers next to nothing. And Ontario gets the 2nd lowest per capita transfer around that one.
The Canada Social Transfer/CST, subsidizes post-secondary schools, provincial welfare plans, early childhood development and education (provincial, their own programs) and Ontario gets the least per capita around that one.
It's the one and only jurisdiction that has never received the equalization welfare handout transfer and of course not: someone has to pay for it all. Not that the rest of the Canadas give a crap. Stick it to "the feds" like they have geese that lay golden eggs under magical money trees. They do. It's called Southern Ontario. More specifically it's called the Extended Golden Horseshoe Area and the Ontario section of the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, which includes the Extended Golden Horseshoe Area and you can get all kinds of stats about that -- other than economic stats because it's paying all the debts and bills and handouts to the rest of the Ontarios and the rest of the Canadas. And then there's the City of Toronto and GTA inside that, with outrageous tax raping, looting and pillaging by the Ontario and confederate feds.
It has a lot to do with taxes paid out, there are more people in the the Toronto area than in any other jurisdiction in the country other than the rest of the Ontarios and all of the Quebecs. Juat around PST, GST, personal and corporate income taxes from over half the GDP of the Ontarios, 1/4 of the GDP of the Canadas, in the Greater Toronto Area/GTA, which is smaller than the StatsCan Toronto municipal area.
The City of Toronto alone, with one city hall to try to represent itself with, has the Toronto Stock Exchange, every major bank head office and most of the smaller bank head offices and 87% of foreign bank head offices in the Canadas making it the economic/financial center of the Canadas. 40% of the head offices of "Canada's" top thousand companies (over $600 million in annual revenues) and more Fortune 500 companies than any other city in North America, making it (quite) the global business center of the Canadas, the only global city in the Canadas that ever turns up in world-wide analyses, a beta city because it mainly deals with the U.S. usually right under L.A. in the same category where NYC is an alpha city for global business for many obvious reasons.
It's got the largest biomed/biotech cluster and medical faculty (R&D, Life Sciences) in North America and gets zero from the confederate feds for that, as opposed to this:
Toronto Star, Mar. 12, 2005. 08:48 AM
101 reasons Toronto counts
City has potential to compete globally
...
5. Fix this little-known injustice: The federal government invests $750 million a year on 40 National Research Council facilities (such as labs).
The GTA does 30 per cent of the country's science research, yet has zero national science facilities. None.
Ottawa has 14, Vancouver three, Calgary, Halifax and Montreal have two each.
Charlottetown, Longueuil, Edmonton, Gatineau, Moncton, Regina and 11 other cities have one each.
...
How much of our taxes are paying for those "national" research facilities? Who even knew about it?
Something else turns up at least once a week around 'Ontario," like there's another federal transfer that subsidizes provinces (the territories have different formulae for most handouts from South Ontario) to pay for highway infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. With what the other provinces get out of it (I saw signs on a nice new highway running from nowhere to nowhere else that matters through Lethbridge, Alberta, stating "
75% Funded by the Government of Canada" and Edmonton and Calgary also get that money to fund their public transit -- remember "Your Ontario Tax Dollars At Work -- Mike Harris"? Alberta reported a MINUS $2.5 billion provincial debt and a slight 'conservative" budget miscalculation of
$7.8 billion in what liberals call a surplus but what conservatives call over-taxation regardless of where the money comes from it belong to the taxpayers, not to any government and $7.8 billion on not even 3 million people in Alberta at the time, is quite a lot of over-taxation -- and their premier cut healthcare on them for no apparent reason and then came up with a provincial debt without even running a deficit first, so he could run to "the feds" to demand money for some rapid transit system in Edmonton; "Something wrong with your own money sitting in the rainy day/heritage fund, over $10 billion stuffed under your mattress?" But they'd only say that to Ontario, regardless of what party happened to be running the confederate mess and without a care in the world about debts or deficits or anything else Ontario has to deal with).
Compared to what the other 9 provinces have received in the highway infrastructure repair and upgrade transfer, per capita because more people require more highways and use them more. Ontario has more square miles of highways than the rest of the "federation" combined. And it's exactly why it gets ripped off: it's a monstrosity in this hopeless "federation." The City of Toronto's roads would stretch from one end of the country to the other if they were laid out and people would be bitching like hell about the condition of them if they were. Toronto is a behemoth in this "federation" and it's not even a big city. The rest of this country is just hopeless. With the confederate handouts, of South Ontario's taxes to the rest of the "federation" around highway infrastructure, what the rest have received on average out of our taxes, averaged out between the 9 other provinces, Ontario is $100 billion short on that transfer over the last ten years.
Toronto is outperforming the North American Average in Terms of Job Growth
In many of Toronto's export clusters, the Toronto region outperforms the North American average in terms of job growth.
For example:
...in job terms
Toronto has the single largest Biomedical and Biotechnology cluster of any metropolitan area in North America. The success of this cluster is strongly linked to leading-edge knowledge and research capabilities the University of Toronto, for example, has the largest faculty of medicine in North America.
...similarly
the Business and Professional Services cluster is one of the largest in North America and is growing more rapidly than its American counterparts in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston or Washington.
...
Toronto's Food and Beverage cluster is the largest manufacturing industry in the city. Businesses within Toronto specialize in innovative product development tied to our diverse multicultural communities, tourism and a competitive and entrepreneurial restaurant industry.
That's what happens around real markets. Not just little spin-off jobs but spin-off industries.
...
Toronto's Information Technology and Telecommunications cluster is larger than New York's or Los Angeles' and is unique in its strength in both hardware and software.
Lots more and even pretty graphics at
www.city.toronto.on.ca/bu...petes.htm.
RESPONDING TO THE NAFTA CHALLENGE: ONTARIO AS A NORTH AMERICAN REGION STATE
AND TORONTO AS A GLOBAL CITY-REGION
Paper Prepared for
Global City-Regions Conference
UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research
Los Angeles, October 21-23, 1999
www.irpp.org/newsroom/arc...25pape.pdf
ONTARIO AS A NORTH AMERICAN REGION STATE
Comments Prepared For
BORDERLINES:
CANADA IN NORTH AMERICA
Calgary
September 12/13, 2002
qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/f...1/0010.pdf
LOTS MORE AT:
www.irpp.org/indexe.htm but lots for sale too
<!--EZCODE LIST START--><ul><li> Two-thirds of the Canadian consumer market and one-half of USconsumer market is within one-day’s trucking of Toronto;</li><li> On Industrial side, three-quarters of Canadian and over one-halfof US manufacturing firms are within one-day’s trucking;</li><li> Household income market within 400 miles is at least as large asthe 400-mile market for New York or Boston;</li><li> Toronto has 91% of Canada’s foreigh banks: 90% of topadvertising companies, 90% of public accountants, 80% of toplaw firms, 58% of foreign-owned companies, and on and on.</li><li> Toronto is a leading N-A centre for finance, research, culture, etc.</li><li> Global city-regions are the dynamic motors of the information andglobal economies;</li><li> Without Toronto and the GTA as an economic engine with aninternational reach, there would be no Ontario region-state.</li><li> The GTA with 4.5 million people has 40% of Ontario’s populationand 50% of its GDP – this means that it has roughly 1/5 of Canada’sGDP. [Out-dated. 5.1 million people and 1/4 of Canada's real GDP.]</li><li> The GTA is Canada’s financial, industrial, services, R and D,knowledge and (for English Canada) cultural capital.</li></ul><!--EZCODE LIST END-->
I don't even know if the two documents above are around at the IRPP still but all of the sites listed above and the PDF's, for people to figure out what South Ontario IS (in South Ontario, the Ontario end of the Windsor-Quebec City corridor) clearly demonstrate, without having to get a business/economics degree, a few evening of reading here and there so that the people of South Ontario can figure out that
nothing is going to fix the problems it's up against because the Outer Canadas are lost.
All kinds of marketing tricks are used to make this "Canada" thing look like things are going on elsewhere. Percentages around population, economic (usually GDP, which includes handouts) growth because there's
nothing out there. A town of 100,000 people gains over 10% in population growth but no one mentions that it only has 100,000 people; or a province. So it picked up 10,000 people, so what? It's a few subway trains and God knows how many people the double-decker GO (short for Government of Ontario but they dumped $50 a year on Toronto city hall in their own expenses, while it was saving up portions of nickels to try to get the Shappard subway line in with 0% provincial tax returns and 0% confederate tax returns, not "funding." Funding comes from elsewhere, not our own pockets) transit trains with 12 cars or whatever they haul during rush hour into the City of Toronto. The population of the Atlantic Canadas heads in and out of the City of Toronto every DAY.
The solution to deficits is to pay them off. The solution to public schools that should be condemned is to condemn them and build new ones. The solution to everything is to fix it. Roads, public transit, education is the fuel for this economy. It's knowledge-based and well-educated human capital is the fuel, not raw commodities for export (due to no markets to speak of) as with the Outer Canadas, which is everything outside the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.
Well, there's the City of Toronto, falling apart to the extent that the most insulated CEO's who just commute in and out, started to notice the decline of Toronto's (so their, they pay massive taxes into this mess of a "federation" and in more ways than one by creating lots of jobs ... they're the last ones you want to tax or they'll move -- it's a global economy and we can't afford this shit to pay for cows and pigs and chickens and two by fours and all other shit the Outer Canadas deal with and have been smacked upside the head over by the U.S. and good for the U.S., maybe 1,000 more smacks upside the head will wake them up and make them figure out which century this is; our own feds don't do anything but appease the spoiled little pigs and with
our money) and the GTA doesnt't exist without the City of Toronto. And without the GTA there's no Canada let alone Ontario.
Then there's the Montreal area and they don't want to separate. The Frasier Institute did a study in 1991 on what it would cost if Quebec could ever figure the Clarity Act out. It's written backwards quite intentionally so that nothing has a hope in hell of ever suceeding from this "federation." It's another book but I'll be more than happy to address it if anyone thinks that it's some way out of Canada. "Quebec" has real land rights, deeds that are good outside this "federation" but only in the south as with "Ontario." They have to buy the rest of the land off the "federation" ... if we feel like selling it. And if the Aboriginal nations feel like selling. In 1991, along with Quebec's share of the federal debt and federal assets in Quebec that can't be pulled out and having to buy the bulk of its land if it wanted to keep the whole jurisdiction (and there's no other way) then its debt would be over double its GDP and that's its GDP as part of the Canadas, not as a foreign country with no economic/financial system; for starters, that has to come up with its own central bank/currency, economic system (exchanges that anyone would bother with other than as a garage sale), passports/embassies/consulates (diplomatic relations), trade agreements, get some stats out and have the world believe them, open its exchanges and figure out what its currency would be worth in relation to Canada's let alone the U.S.'s. It's worth about 21 cents on every Canadian dollar as is and it can't do better than that with an unknown GDP and debt that was over double its former GDP as part of the Canadas.
It wouldn't be starting from scratch as a new banana republic that can't even grow bananas. But why would it want all of the Quebecs? Why would we want all of the Ontarios?
How to go about fixing the current deficit problems is to pay it off. How to go about paying it off is to get $20 of the $23 billion "Ontario" (south) taxpayers paid out last year to the confederate feds, never to be seen again - in South or North Ontario. And the confederate feds download their own expenses onto "us": depending on where in this "Ontario" thing someone happens to live. The City of Toronto proper lost $11 billion in taxes last year, never to be seen again. Part of it goes into paying for the rest of the Ontarios, $1.4 billion last year, the rest to the confederate feds.
As for "Ontario" and the Canadas, there's this:
Windsor-Quebec City Corridor
Ontario Section
10,706,513 93% of Ontario's population
Quebec Section
6,327,354 87% of Quebec's population
Total Population
17,033,867 57% of Canada's population
Source: Statistics Canada 2001 Census
It's tiny part of the Canadas that pays up to 70% of all federal revenues. Supply is supply, there's plenty of agriculture (cash crops too and it's actually processed/packaged/shipped to real markets) in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor/Mixedwood Plains/Inner Canada, pre-processing, processing, refinining, etc. in the sparsely populated areas that see more and more tourism every year, from the cities and we don't pay the debts, deficits, bills/ultra-socialist expenses and handouts of Africa, South America or anywhere else we get supply from other than the Outer Canadas -- everything outside the Windsor-Quebec City corridor -- in this total failure of a British experiment called Canada.
The above, South Ontario and South Quebec, have to get business leaders, heads of professional guilds/labor unions, organizations that matter like trade boards (connected to Chambers of Commerce and the Chambers of Commerce from other countries), tourism, etc., bypass the worthless politicians, educate South Ontario as to what it IS as a whole, how much it's losing in taxes every year and where the money is going. Hit people where it hurts. Communism would be an improvement to this mess. Failure isn't tolerated in iron fist communism. Economic success is penalized to reward failures and with zero accountability in this ridiculous mess.
Nothing has anything to say about South Ontario and South Quebec creating their own governments, disbanding the confederate feds, a Declaration is all we need along with our terms in contracts for them to sign. Then the Outer Canadas can throw parades. They'll finally be rid of despised "Ontario and Quebec" once they figure out that most of the Ontarios and Quebecs are just like they are, pawning off raw commodities and the jobs/markets, well take a business course, that go along with that stupidity, which is why the Outer Canadas has no population or industry to speak of. Toronto doesn't even depend on manufacturing but does over half of all manufacturing done in the Canadas. Toronto makes more money than the rest of the Ontarios combined, without the population expenses and all of Quebec and everything else.
We can't have an economic union with the Outer Canadas, as in using the same central bank/fiscal policies/exchange rates. Every economy in the Outer Canadas is based on commodities. Commodities are volatile, the prices aren't set by marketing they're fixed by world supply and demand, which is up and down and all over the place depending on what's selling due to marketing, which is why the bulk of the top marketing firms in the Canadas are parked in Toronto.
You can slap a $30 piece of moulding on a vehicle and charge $500 more for it if the marketing works out. And charge $750 to replace it when it falls off or breaks as it's designed to. And that creates demand, which fixes the prices of commodites. We can market beef or not. We've got all the markets and our investors can't deal with the Bank of Canada f***ing up interest rates to lower the value of the the Canadian dollar and everything attached to it, so that the Outer Canadas can pawn their commodities off.
And then "Canadians" without a clue bitch about a marketing label of "corporate welfare," because they have no clue. You screw American investors over, in what's a totally different country in the Outer Canadas, either commodity prices are too high or too low so the value of the Canadian dollar has to be changed or they all go bankrupt and it totally screws our investors. It costs $2 million/hour to shut down an average-sized plant in Inner Canada (Windsor-Quebec City corridor but mainly South Ontario) to account for a higher or lower exchange rate to re-tool the plants and call in the millwrights and teams to get the retooling done, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars. It's totally tied to the cost of production and operations, finance is needed for that at whatever interest rate, it's called "productivity." Whatever investors are paying for the production of goods and services in South Ontario is steady on their end, in American dollars but not with the "Canadian" dollar going up and down along with interest rates, cost of labor and everything else and nothing that the Outer Canadas even understands let alone has to deal with.
The Bank of Canada created a disaster in 2003 along with the disasters of SARS and the power outage South Ontario had to deal with, and American investors told the feds that if the Bank Rate was cut again they'd leave Ontario plants to rot and too bad. The feds don't control the Bank Rate but poor Western Canada was shedding jobs again and exporters were on the verge of bankrupcty praying for the American economy to pick up so they could pawn their quite ample raw commodities off, and it didn't pick up so the Bank of Canada cut the Bank Rate again and American investors did exactly what they said they'd do: left plants in South Ontario to rot.
The feds had no choice but to pay for their retooling and state governments in the U.S. do all kinds of bribing to get investment and if the Canadas can't deal with that then the Canadas needs to be out of our way so that we can do what we have to do to ensure that we get investment. It's not as though the feds are handing us anyone else's money. It's our own money and pittances of it, so f*** them and f*** everything else for being clueless.
We don't compete with the rest of the Canadas. They're not in our in the same ballpark, they're not even in the same league and don't even know what a league is. South Ontario has a more than diverse enough economy for a federal government to be dealing with; in a union with South Quebec. We can use the same central bank as South Quebec but not the Outer Canadas. And we'll pay less for supply and more importantly, so will the U.S., and we look after ourselves first, we have a lot of infrastructure to repair let alone upgrade and will have to take on the usual share of the federal and provincial debts but not in the same governments or economic union with the Outer Canadas.
And we have to LOWER our taxes, not raise them.
Provincial Budget Primer: Ontario’s personal income taxes. Higher than you think
Let’s begin with a basic, but increasingly controversial, statement: Ontario taxpayers believe they pay some of the lowest taxes in Canada, when in fact the province’s personal income tax rate is one of the
highest in the country. That this is not altogether believable at first blush (or even on a second) is due to a long running campaign of academics, organized labour and social activists to paint tax relief in Ontario as a give-away to the rich with trivial benefits to low- and middle-income earners.
The truth is the Ontario Conservative government has taken impressive steps to reduce income taxes on lower and middle-income earners since 1996, but has done little to lower its top tax rate. Currently, the personal income tax rate on workers who earn less than $32,121 is 6.05 per cent of wages. Those earning between $32,121 and $64,306 pay 9.15 per cent. And the third rate of 11.16 per cent applies to incomes above $64,306. Most would agree these are competitive rates.
Yet two levels of income surtaxes cloud this pleasant tax picture — a 20 per cent rate on provincial income tax paid between $3,710 and $4,682, and a 56 per cent rate (the 20 per cent rate plus a second 36 per cent rate) on provincial income tax paid above $4,682. When these rates are measured in terms of earned income, the 20 per cent surtax is levied against workers who earn between $55,000 and $65,000 and the 56 per cent surtax is applied to income over $65,000.
...
Surtaxes are the political ruse that allows Ontario to claim there are three low rates and hide the fact high taxes are imposed on incomes that many would properly define as middle class. Moreover, they make it difficult for taxpayers to know exactly how large the tax bite is or to compare tax rates with other jurisdictions. Sadly, Ontario is in company with the high tax provinces of P.E.I., Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in imposing surtaxes.
The hidden truth of these surtaxes means individual Ontario taxpayers actually face four rates (see chart below [see link below for charts from the site]) and they peg the effective high-income tax rate at a whopping
17.41 per cent on incomes above
$65,000. This is a far cry from the posted 11.16 per cent rate, and affects an awful lot of people that do not consider themselves rich. Of the six million people in Ontario who pay personal income taxes, over one million — 1 in 6 — are hit by provincial surtaxes. By way of comparison, income earners do not pay Ottawa’s top federal income tax rate until their taxable income exceeds
$104,648. In the United States, the top federal rate kicks in on incomes above
$450,000.
That Ontario’s top tax rate is high even by Canadian standards and puts the province in league with Quebec and Atlantic Canada — high tax and lower growth jurisdictions — comes as a surprise to many. Yet the numbers speak for themselves: Ontario’s tax rate is bested by Alberta with its single 10 per cent income tax rate; British Columbia where its top rate of 14.70 per cent is paid on income above $88,260; and even Socialist Saskatchewan where its top rate of 15 per cent kicks in at $65,000.
At 17.41 per cent on earnings over $65,000, Ontario’s true top personal income tax rate
is punitive, contributes to the brain drain, and is a disincentive to work.
Full article/charts at
Canadian Taxpayers Federation
And Sorbera has done what? Where do "Ontarians" think the bulk of the taxes come from in this mess of a province? From Huntsville, Ditchville, etc., where they can't even pay for their own law enforcement or from Toronto, the GTA, Golden Horseshoe area? They don't have to "think" with $11 billion of the $23 billion McGuinty (premier of Ontario) claims Ontario paid out in taxes last year never to be seen again. $11 billion is City of Toronto, not even the GTA. And $23 billion is a crock of shit that wouldn't even allow the feds to pay the interest on the federal debt. It's about triple that. The rest of the Toronto area pays out about the same as the City of Toronto does, which brings it up to $22 billion. So the rest of the Ontarios are only managing to come up with $1 billion more in taxes paid out and never seen again, in the entire Windsor-Ottawa portion of the Windsor-Quebec City corridor? We know that everything north of that is either breaking even of leeching taxes off of us and more of the latter than the former but $23 billion is a crock. A big crock that would certainly solve the fiscal problems of "Ontario" and then some, but it's mathematically impossible. The Ontario feds have no clue what Ontario taxpayers pay directly to the confederate feds. It's a wild guess. And the confederate feds will go along with it, even if they can't figure out how they manage to pay out over $30 billion in the Canada Health Transfer alone, let alone everything else and the interest on the federal debt and their multi-billion dollar surpluses.
The Windsor-Ottawa corridor has 93% of "Ontario's" population and all of the industries that matter and make the money. The rest of the Ontarios is worth about 2% of Ontario's economy. And nothing in South Ontario comes close to Toronto, so where is this illegal tax increase on healthcare coming from? Little Windsor? Where? The bulk of it is coming from Toronto as usual. And GTA hospitals got their budgets cut, nurses have been fired, coverage has been de-listed from OHIP and the hopeless "provincial" Liberals have managed to
increase the deficit by half a billion dollars in a year -- with massive tax increases and even more cuts to the Toronto area.
Impaired driving used to be acceptable and Harris paid a
$70+ billion deficit down created by who else? Ontario Liberals then the worst, the first and only time the NDP will ever run this province, running up $10+ billion deficits every year for 5 years along with insane legislation (around this area) and that's what all of the privatizations, cuts, slashing and burning of the Harris Conservative Common Sense Revolution was about. Ontario was on public warning by the World Bank that if it didn't get its economic house in order it'd be slapped with a third world credit rating/interest rate.
So did the confederates come running to the rescue? $70+ billion? They can't even bail Toronto out of natural disasters, they're totally worthless aside from totally screwing us year after decade. How do you pay a $70+ billion budget deficit off, with a $120+ billion provincial debt to boot, in a "federation" that won't even give you a break on paying for ITS bills? We got more cuts from the confederate feds and more tax pillaging while trying to pay a $70+ billion budget deficit off and for what? So that hopeless revolting little NL can have over $2,000 more per capita out of our own money than we get to spend on ourselves per capita?
We are at war with this "federation." Economic war, marketing war, fiscal and economic war, legislative war, and have been for over a decade to the extreme. But you think we should raise taxes?
Raising taxes isn't an option and no one in Ontario should even be considering it. The interim solution is to get more of our own taxes back. The better solution is another book or five.
