We have a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, a health care crisis, an education funding crisis, an infrastructure crisis.
Yet even as these developments became obvious, Ontario Premier Doug Ford cut taxes – on gasoline, on driving licence renewals, developer fees, building materials, etc.
The federal and provincial governments have downloaded responsibilities to municipalities which have been trying desperately to hold the line on property taxes.
Even now that they are debating budgets that will most certainly require tax increases, the federal and provincial governments are adding to their burdens with further cuts to the funds they have been providing for refugees, for childcare and related services.
There was a time when low-cost housing was built by the federal and provincial governments. That’s long gone because they were focussed on cutting taxes.
There was a time when universities were well funded. Ford capped university and college tuition but did not increase funding so now they are filling classrooms with foreign students who pay about three times the tuition of Canadian students.
And now foreign students are lining up at food banks. And living in squalid conditions, such as nine Indian students I know living in one house and a Nigerian student living in one room for which he is charged $900 a month.
Our infrastructure has been neglected because municipal politicians would not pay to maintain it. In Kitchener, where I live, decades of delays have ended in annual increases in surtaxes on water bills to finally begin ripping up streets to replace water mains and sewers.
In Toronto, which watched the Gardiner Expressway crumble for years, the situation is so dire that Ford finally bit the bullet and resumed responsibility.
But in my community, long-promised highways between Kitchener and Guelph, Waterloo and Elmira and north, Kitchener and Stratford and from Guelph to Niagara have not been built. There is a daily cost in time lost in traffic tie-ups . The environment also suffers as traffic is stalled while engines continue to guzzle fossil fuels.
My first candidate is restoration of the federal GST. That would do more to fight inflation than hiking interest rates and the burden would be spread across the entire economy. The province also ought to increase the GST to pay for education, health care and housing for the homeless and poor.
An inheritance tax ought to be brought back. It doesn’t cost the dead people anything and is a tax on a windfall for heirs who did little to earn the wealth.
It’s past time to stop cutting taxes and services and to reverse course so we can once again have a decent society.
