Search Results for: Municipal Revenues
Perspectives Paper | 2019
Property Taxes in Canada: Current Issues and Future Prospects
Harry Kitchen, Enid Slack, and Tomas Hachard
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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Special Projects | 2019
Summary Report for City of Toronto-TTC Transit Expert Advisory Panel
Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance
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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Perspectives Paper | 2019
The Right Tax for the Job: The Role of Property Taxes in Funding Cities
Bev Dahlby and Melville McMillan
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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Presentation | 2019
Steering Low-Carbon Growth in Emerging African Cities: Insights from Dar es Salaam
Chibulu Luo
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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Book | 2019
Funding the Canadian City
Heather Evans, Lisa Philipps, Enid Slack and Lindsay Tedds
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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IMFG Paper | 2019
Mind the Funding Gap: Transit Financing in Los Angeles County and Metro Vancouver
Matthew Lesch
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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IMFG Paper | 2019
Does Local Government Autonomy Promote Fiscal Sustainability? Lessons from Illinois
Matthew Walshe
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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Video | 2019
Toronto’s Future: Who’s Paying? The 7th Annual IMFG Toronto City Manager’s Address
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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Search Within Results
Inside Halton: Enid Slack on the Vacant Home Tax
September 6, 2024
Journal of Commerce: Aaron Moore on Winnipeg development
August 14, 2024
CBC Winnipeg: Aaron Moore on Third-Party Donations for Municipal Elections
July 22, 2024