ANTI-TAX CRUSADER FINALLY DISCOVERS NECESSITY OF TAXES

John Tory, the Mayor of Toronto, this week announced his intention to seek a property tax increase specifically for the city-building fund (a dedicated money pool which is only for capital and maintenance projects related to transit and housing). This is notable because John Tory has been, for most of his political life, one of those useless dickwads who insist that any tax raise at all is somehow immoral.

(Before anybody starts arguing with me about tax ethics, a brief explanation: property tax rates in Toronto aren’t a fixed rate. Like if I say “I want to raise property taxes by five percent,” it’s not an increase in the property tax rate, because properties aren’t taxed at a fixed rate, because there’s no real way to safely determine property values that can’t be gamed on a year-to-year basis. Instead, every so often your home’s value is reassessed for property tax purposes, and then your property tax is calculated off that value, but it’s still not a fixed percentage rate. When I say “I want to raise property taxes by five percent,” what I actually mean is “I want to raise the amount of money property taxes generate by five percent.” This is an important distinction, because it means - and you may have already realized this - any year where property taxes do not increase by at least the value of that year’s inflation is one where property owners are effectively getting a tax cut.)

Tory has long held that Toronto should not have to pay so much money for its transit projects, for two reasons. Firstly, on the basis that Toronto contributes much more tax money than it ever receives back and that it desperately needs infrastructure projects in order to continue being a cash cow for both the province and the country, which is certainly true. Secondly, because raising taxes is something irresponsible left-wingers do, not sensible fiscal conservatives like John Tory, which is idiotic.

The problem with all of this is that begging the province and the federal government for more money is not and has never been a winning gambit for Toronto. Most of the province and country hates Toronto (there is literally a fun documentary called “Let’s All Hate Toronto” which explores this - it’s on Vimeo if you want to watch it) and thus politicians at all levels are essentially incentivized not to give Toronto money. Which means the only way to get more money for Toronto is to put local taxes in place. Toronto put a (small) hotel tax in place to get some additional money from tourists, but most of the other avenues they’ve explored - most notably tolling the major roadways entering Toronto - have been shut down by the province, who technically controls all of Toronto’s laws.

That leaves property taxes, and Tory and his ilk have been loath to raise property taxes at all over the past decade, and when they have raised them they’ve only raised them at the rate of inflation, which is ridiculous because Toronto has some of the lowest property taxes in Canada and the largest, richest city in Canada should not be effectively subsidizing its homeowners. If Toronto had property taxes equivalent to, say, Guelph there would be no fiscal crisis here at all and most of these projects - like the multibillion dollar repair backlog for Toronto’s affordable housing corporation - would already be complete or close to it.

But we don’t, and instead for years and years conservative politicians have been pretending that the money will just show up somehow, and now the rubber has come to hit the road. It galls me to give John Tory any credit for this, but on the other hand, there is the argument for celebrating the fact that at least he finally decided to show up.

THE AUDITOR GENERAL MAKES THE TORIES LOOK SILLY (AGAIN)

It hasn’t been a good week for the Ontario Conservative Party, considering how badly the teachers’ union negotiations are going for them (currently Education Minister Steven Lecce is taking the position that agreeing to not have oversized classes - which literally nobody wants - is a concession on the part of the government, which certainly seems like a great way to ensure that nobody is on their side), but it got worse following the Auditor General’s report.

Most of the report is the usual Auditor General’s report - a lot of really wonky line-item accounting and lots of notes about which government services are performing well and which aren’t. It’s a lot of technical reading that even policy reporters can get bored reading. But there’s usually at least one thing in every Auditor General’s report that makes headlines, and this time around it was the AG’s assertion that the Ontario government’s climate change plans are both unrealistic and ineffective. In all seriousness, the Auditor General noted that the Tories were taking credit for policies they had already ended (like electrical vehicle tax credits) and were overstating the impact of their carbon reduction policies - which were already designed to lower carbon emissions targets from the more ambitious (but still insufficient) goals the Liberals had previously put in place.

This is particularly bad timing for such a report, considering that Ontario is currently suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the carbon tax and one of their central arguments is that the carbon tax is unnecessary because the provinces can take care of the problem by themselves, and now there’s a formal report saying “actually you can’t, you’re idiots.”

Luckily, Doug Ford clearly wants to be the leader of the federal Conservative party, which will soon make him everybody’s problem and not just Ontario’s.

I DON’T LIKE THE OLYMPICS BUT THIS IS NEWS I GUESS

Russia has a long history of possibly-cheating at the Olympics, and in recent years (as doping technology has accelerated faster than testing technology) they’ve been accused of cheating more and more. In 2014 numerous medals were stripped from Russian athletes (although some were later returned for lack of proof). In 2016, over a hundred Russian athletes were disqualified from competing at the Rio Olympics. In 2018, Russia wasn’t even allowed to technically compete at the Olympics - the athletes who were allowed (which was not all of them by any means) were required to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” which should be read in the spirit of “Olympic Athletes Who Are Technically From Russia And They Don’t Get To Wear Russian-Themed Gear And They Don’t Get The Russian Anthem Played If They Win.” And even then, some of those athletes got caught doping and were disqualified.

At this point, the only thing further that could be done to further punish the Russians would be to simply ban them entirely from the Olympics, and this week that may actually happen, since the International Olympic Committee is meeting to discuss what measures are appropriate after Russia got caught tampering with lab data that the World Anti-Doping Agency (also known as WADA, and yes, there is such a thing) had collected from Russian testing laboratories as part of the terms of Russia’s reinstatement to Olympic competition following the 2018 Olympics. Yes: Russia actually cheated on the drug tests it was taking to make up failing the previous drug tests. Now WADA is arguing before the IOC that at this point, the only thing left to do is simply ban Russia from competing entirely until Russia stops being a bunch of cheating dickheads.

This is silly, of course, because it’s the Olympics and the Olympics are always silly. You can get a medal for sailing at the Olympics. That’s silly. But regardless of the level of silliness, the Olympics still matter to a whole lot of people because they’re a way of exercising nationalistic urges, and Russia these days has a whole lot of nationalism it’s working out and a lot of the time it chooses to invade a place or tamper with an election instead of just, I dunno, trying to build the world’s tallest dome or something else that can go in the Guinness Book of World Records.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Tall Girl (2019, Nzingha Stewart, Netflix) - 3/5

Cold Pursuit (2019, Hans Petter Moland, Amazon Prime) - 4/5

Palio (2015, Cosima Spender, Netflix) - 3.5/5

The most recent expansion for Battletech dropped on Steam this week and it’s pretty much the only game I’ve been playing since; at this point the marriage of original boardgame mechanics plus new videogame mechanics is nearly perfect, and with the expansions there is just so much breadth to play in. It’s a remarkable piece of work and if you like giant robots beating the shit out of each other it’s worth a play.

See you in seven.