Search Results for: Municipal Revenues

This paper examines the current state of property tax policy across Canada and finds that municipalities and provinces are facing a number of shared challenges and questions, including: whether to apply progressive property tax rates, the volatility of property taxes, the benefits and drawbacks of using property tax incentives to attract businesses, and the role of provincial property taxes
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In May 2019, the City of Toronto and TTC established an Expert Advisory Panel to provide input and advice to inform the City and TTC’s engagement with the Province on Ontario on the Ontario-Toronto Realignment of Transit Responsibilities Review. IMFG was engaged to help design the panel and facilitated panel discussions on various topics relating to the current state challenges of transit in the Toronto region, role of transit in city building, integrated mobility, governance, and funding.
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The property tax generates a significant proportion of municipal revenues in Canada and has done so since Confederation. This paper makes the case that the property tax is a good tax for funding local (especially general-purpose) governments for several reasons: the base of the tax is immovable; the tax can generate reliable and sufficient revenues and make local governments independent from other orders of government; many of the core goods and services provided by local governments directly benefit property owners; the tax is visible to property owners; and the tax is easy to administer.
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This presentation by Chibulu Luo, a 2018-19 IMFG Graduate Fellow, explores three key questions: What role do African cities and municipal governments play in producing low-carbon urban growth? Which institutions or governing bodies should take the lead, and why? And what are the opportunities to scale up investments to finance sustainable technologies and infrastructure?
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This collection of papers by leading experts, emerging scholars, and policy makers in the field of municipal taxation and finance sets out the financial challenges facing municipalities in Canada today and examines various practical means of navigating these challenges.
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Across North American cities, the demand for better public transit is pervasive, yet many local governments lack sufficient revenue to finance the construction of new infrastructure. To resolve this dilemma, some localities have turned to citizens directly, proposing temporary, earmarked, sales tax increases as a way to finance capital-intensive projects. Why have some communities been more receptive to this funding model than others? This study addresses this question by comparing the recent experiences of Los Angeles County (2008), where a ballot measure to raise money for transportation was successful and Metro Vancouver (2015), where a similar public vote was unsuccessful.
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Whether institutional constraints are desirable is a debate that may alternatively be framed as one over the merits of local government autonomy. This paper contributes to this debate by empirically analysing the effects of local government autonomy on several outcomes, including the size of government, the ownsource revenue mix, and fiscal sustainability.
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Chris Murray, Toronto’s City Manager, is a former planner who thinks of the future in terms of decades, not years. In this video of his address, Toronto’s Future: Who’s Paying?, he discusses the “elephant in the room” when it comes to municipal government: what kind of city are we leaving behind for future generations?
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