Just as a stopped clock gets the time right twice a day, someone with whom you fundamentally disagree can forcefully say something revealing. That’s how I felt when I came across these words in the Globe and Mail, straight from the mouth of Mayor Rob Ford at a council meeting in early May. He was replying to a question from city councillor and TTC chair Karen Stintz.
“You don’t support subways. I support subways. You support LRTs. I do not support LRTs. You support streetcars. I do not support streetcars. Fine, you support tax increases. I don’t. You support higher fees, implementing user fees, implementing new taxes. I don’t. We’re two different systems.”
Mayor Ford’s system seems to be one where his subway wishes are funded by others. He doesn’t like the idea that you have to pay for things you want.
Low-density communities are never able to generate the revenue to pay their costs, and they never would have been built if subsidies had not been put in place.
It was a few years ago, when writing the book The Shape of the Suburbs, about the development of Peel, York and Durham regions, that I realized that those low-density suburban communities were founded on the principle that they should not have to pay their own way.
The practice of suburban subsidies started with the first large corporate suburb, Don Mills, in 1952.
North York Council didn’t have the money to provide the sewage services needed for the project, so the developer, E. P. Taylor, who saw the new style of development as something of a gamble, anted up the money. That got him the approval he needed, and the North York government was not out a penny.
When Mississauga needed a sewage and water system in the late 1960s to service the astounding amount of new low-density development, it pressured the province to build it — without servicing, development would never happen.
The province shouldered the cost of the South Peel servicing scheme, providing a very large subsidy for sprawl.
A few years later, the province agreed to give the same kind of subsidy to build the “Big Pipe” in York Region and Durham.
No formal accounting has been done, but I estimate the subsidies put in by the province for these services amounted to some $1 billion.
Ever since, suburban politicians have been hooked on subsidies as a way of life.
Now, when it is apparent that low-density communities can not provide viable transportation options, suburban politicians demand money from the province.
Mayor Rob Ford wants subways in Scarborough, and he thinks the province should pay for them. Mayor Hazel McCallion wants the province to fund $1.5 billion for an LRT running through the middle of Mississauga.
It didn’t used to be that way.
The former city of Toronto and Metro worked on the principle that local government had to pay its own way.
Development had to be dense and compact enough to generate the property taxes and other charges to cover the costs of water and sewage services, roads and community centres and services. Toronto’s Yonge Street subway was funded with the surplus that the city’s transit system captured during the Second World War. (Indeed, the TTC broke even, meeting its costs from the fare box, until 1972 when the two-fare zone system was abandoned and service to the suburbs was expanded.)
The newer system — Mayor Ford’s system — is to get someone else to pay. It’s a bizarre way to run a city, but there seem to be a lot of politicians who treat this as a first principle.
The old-fashioned political system says that if we want to build more transit, we’ll need to pay for it. That means raising taxes — property taxes, sales tax or whatever — or levying tolls.
Being bold about the link between expenditures and revenues might be a brave thing to do today in the public sector, but isn’t that precisely what we need right now?
