The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Liberals ready to bestow vast new taxing powers on municipalities Not content with breaking their campaign pledge to hold the line on taxes, the Liberals are now poised to give municipalities vast new taxing powers. Afraid to break his pledge a second time, Premier Dalton McGuinty will let municipalities do it for him. First, the Liberals will make the necessary legal changes to allow them to provide municipalities with far broader powers of regulation and taxation. They have already introduced a new City of Toronto Act which follows up on those legal changes to actually outline the new powers being transferred to Toronto. It provides a template for all other municipalities in Ontario. To be fair, the transfer of some of these powers is overdue and a good idea. For instance, a city like Toronto should be able to extend bar hours during the Film Festival without seeking provincial permission. However, if this legislation goes through as proposed we may get a patchwork of bar hours from one municipality to another. The legislation will not allow income or sales tax, no payroll tax and no gas taxes to be levied by newly independent municipalities, however the new provisions are broad and not restrictive. The new powers recognize municipal- QUEEN'S PARK REPORT Ted Chudleigh ities as a mature level of government and essentially provide them with a seat at the table in policy, program and budget deliberations undertaken by the federal or provincial governments. However, Ontario municipalities have the ability to raise money through property taxes, licences, permits and user fees. With multiple levels of govern- ment having their hands on all manner of tax programs the poor taxpayer will have more difficulty assigning responsibility for high taxes. Each level of government will shrug and point fingers at the other level-- just as occurs today on gas taxes. Ostensibly municipalities do not want to raise residential property taxes and cannot raise business property taxes and still entice business, so they will use these new tax powers to reduce the strain on property taxes. If there are issues with property taxes then let's address the root of that problem. I have long said the current value assessment system needs to be fixed. A better assessment system would remove the unfairness which is particularly noticeable when taxes increase. If the issue is significant municipal costs accrued by a specific jurisdiction then let's fix the root of that problem. For example, I know social costs are a huge challenge for some municipalities. First, providing municipalities with some regulation powers, then inviting them to the policy table to work out these challenges one by one, and then reviewing their revenue generating powers, is a more prudent approach to these problems. --Ted Chudleigh is the MPP for Halton