But Toronto doesn t get a cent of PST, GST, gas tax, liquor tax, tobacco tax, income tax, hotel tax, import tax, or any of the other provincial and federal taxes that keep going up, year after year. When times are good as they have been for at least the last four years, everyone benefits - except the City of Toronto. When times are bad, we are the government the people turn to for assistance and our costs increase. Costs that have no business being on the regressive property tax. This meant our residents lost out on some programs.
Nobody likes to cut programs and nobody likes to increase taxes.
But the provincial and the federal governments left us no choice. We could have held this year s tax increase to 1.8 per cent if Queen s Park hadn t taken away our right to access to the commercial and industrial base through bill 140. The budget we passed last month was the best budget possible under the circumstances. It protected core services that our Toronto taxpayers have enjoyed for years and it protected home owners from an unreasonable tax increase. There are more police on the street than there were in 1998.