Search Results for: Perspectives Paper

Financial investments are an important part of the fiscal tools available to Canadian municipalities. A well-executed investment strategy can provide a source of income to municipalities, helping them prepare for future budgetary pressures and revenue fluctuations. This paper describes how the current municipal investment regime in Ontario works and its future direction and challenges.
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This paper argues that municipal accountability officers in Canada can and do address many problems and dilemmas, but they can also create problems of their own. Accountability officers have limited formal authority, but considerable power to influence public opinion. The most important function of accountability officers is to provide citizens with the kind of information they need in order to make intelligent electoral choices.
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City governments in Toronto, New York City, and Los Angeles have each set ambitious GHG reduction targets, and developed programs and policies to reach these targets. This paper draws on their experiences and identifies steering strategies that have proven effective in all three cities.
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This paper argues that additional taxes are entirely appropriate for major cities and estimates the potential revenue that some of these taxes could generate in eight Canadian cities – Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, and Halifax.
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The 21st century has seen a renewed interest internationally in national urban policies. This paper draws on the experience of countries that have explicitly pursued national urban policies to solve complex and interrelated urban challenges.
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Local governments need to make significant financial investments, and must raise revenues through taxes, user fees, and possibly new revenue tools. But before they can take these actions, they have to build trust to convince their residents that new revenues are needed and will be spent wisely.
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This paper evaluates the financial tools available to fund stormwater infrastructure (property taxes, development charges or cash-in-lieu payments, grants, borrowing, and user charges), and proposes user charges as the most appropriate.
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The three main explanations for cost overruns and delays are technical challenges, over-optimism, and strategic misrepresentations. This paper looks at the root of persistent cost overruns on public megaprojects, and proposes ways to fix this problem.
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