Welcome to Toronto, boom town Canada, fat-cat city with white hot real estate and a magnet of a downtown where condo skyscrapers stretch the limits on every corner.
Office buildings and jobs have returned to the core; so have new hotels. The kids whose parents left for the suburbs are back.
Crime’s down, our profile is up. The Economist says this is the best city in the world to live.
Pearson is growing faster than any big city airport in the world. A population the size of Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver combined is headed to the Toronto region by 2050.
“I believe that Toronto is at one of those very special moments in time,” Mayor John Tory told the board of trade in September. “You can feel it in the air and you can see it in the headlines.”
Yet, the city’s senior bureaucrats beg on the boulevard.
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Over the past 10 years jobs increased by 160,000 or 12.7 per cent, TTC ridership jumped 26 per cent, value of building permits rose 76 per cent and the amount of office space occupied increased by eight million square feet.
Meanwhile, Toronto emerged as Canada’s only global city — topping several rankings for livability, cost of dong business, city of opportunity and overall attractiveness for business.
With all that going for it, why is the City of Toronto a perennial beggar? What’s the cause of the fiscal dysfunction? What’s the fix? The paradox of Toronto is summed up in five areas:
- Investors and other levels of government get more of the money generated in Toronto than the city government does.
- Toronto ratepayers are the lowest taxed in the region — even though the city has the widest number of taxing tools (obviously untapped) available to it.
- New city attractions and infrastructure are clearly needed to sustain Toronto’s growing global reach and status. But simply maintaining what it has is a costly undertaking, falling short by $33 billion and counting.
- There are no ongoing plans for the new wave of investments, attractions and “wow projects” needed to prop up the city’s ascendant global status.
- Instead of taxing all property owners and spreading the pain around, city council imposes hidden taxes in the form of fees — so much so that since 2010 Toronto Transit Commission users paid four times more in fare increases than the rest of us paid in property tax hikes
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