Good idea, bad tactics

The lead story in today's Toronto Star reports on a request from Toronto mayor David Miller: Canadian cities should be given one cent of the GST. The city has created a web site, OneCentNow.ca, devoted to this very subject. (Its front page features a penny slowly rising in the east like a bright red sun.)

The statistics presented on this site are quite convincing, and sometimes even startling:

• Toronto faces an annual $1.1 billion infrastructure gap: in other words, this is the amount of money the city needs in order to run effectively.
  
• Toronto is $2.4 billion in debt. (The federal government, you may recall, is running huge surpluses.)
• The main source of revenue for Toronto is property taxes. But a 1% increase in property taxes only raises $18 million for the city. A substantial increase in property taxes would drive many homeowners on fixed incomes, such as seniors, out of their homes.
• PST and GST revenues collected from the city have each increased $100 million each year.
• For every dollar in federal, provincial and municipal taxes Toronto pays, the city only gets eight cents back.
• Toronto pays more than $750 million on programs formerly paid for by the province.
• The city has already laid off more than 1400 full-time staff since amalgamation, despite having to administer programs formerly handled by the province.
  

Other Canadian cities are facing similar problems.

Given that the federal government has reduced the GST once, and is considering doing so again, there may well be tax room that can be given to the cities. But I am convinced that, by focusing on Toronto, the "one cent of GST for cities" movement is making a tactical blunder. Mayor Miller deserves credit for developing a broad consensus on this issue: mayors from all across Ontario and from as far away as Halifax were present at his news conference. But Mr. Miller may have forgotten one important fact: nobody outside Toronto cares about what happens to Toronto. If the one-cent GST movement becomes perceived as a way to primarily benefit Toronto, it stands no chance in hell of gaining any momentum.

Now that a number of mayors and business leaders have stepped forward and declared their support for more stable funding for cities, it's time for the mayor of some other city to take the lead role. Ideally, this somebody should be the mayor of a Conservative stronghold, such as Calgary, or a potential swing riding, such as Markham. (Both mayors have declared their support for more reliable funding measures.)

By the way, sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words: does it look like Stephen Harper is happy to be attending this press conference?