A key ingredient in Toronto’s success has been the city-building and civic leadership that has emerged from private firms, public institutions, non-profits, and cultural sector organizations in Toronto’s wider civil society. This paper reflects on how, for any great city, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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This paper describes the City of Toronto’s financial condition and recent fiscal trends in four areas: spending and services; taxes and revenues; infrastructure; and debt and savings.
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This paper makes the case for a local business tax. The BVT is better than the discriminatory and heavy real property taxes currently levied on businesses in Ontario and other provinces. Moreover, such a tax would be complementary rather than competitive to VATs like the GST and HST.
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Three major trends are pushing us towards an inflection point in provincial-municipal arrangements. Adapting provincial-municipal arrangements to changing circumstances will require a shift in how the two orders of government understand their roles and the nature of their relationships.
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Three major trends are buffeting provincial-municipal arrangements in Ontario. The first is a growing recognition of the role cities and metropolitan regions play as centres of growth and national prosperity. The second is increasing complexity in the provincial-municipal relationship. The third is the emergence of threats to the fiscal health of Ontario municipalities.
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This paper finds that municipalities within Canadian metropolitan areas are signing very few inter-local agreements, especially in comparison to large American metropolitan areas, and provides some preliminary explanations for this trend. Overall, it is argued that provincially imposed regional initiatives and central city annexation is why so few Canadian cities view inter-local cooperation as a solution to servicing dilemmas.
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More than a decade since the amalgamations, two recent IMFG Papers examine the impact these reforms have had on the finances and service delivery in the country’s two biggest cities. This Perspectives paper highlights the key themes and arguments from the two papers.
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The paper first sets out the theory of expenditure assignment with respect to decentralizing infrastructure expenditure, and then considers how practice around the developing world appears to differ from what that theory appears to suggest.
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