On IMFG’s tenth anniversary, panelists Enid Slack, Richard M. Bird, and Zack Taylor look at the past, present, and future of municipal finance and governance and give their progress reports: what have cities learned?
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This paper describes the reasons for forming inter-municipal agreements, discusses the different forms these agreements take, and presents the findings of a 2012 survey of Ontario municipalities that examined the nature of shared services arrangements.
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This paper profiles election campaigns in six of Ontario’s biggest cities – Hamilton, London, Mississauga, Ottawa, Toronto and Windsor. For each of the six cities, a local expert was recruited to take on this task.
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A key ingredient in Toronto’s success has been the city-building and civic leadership that has emerged from private firms, public institutions, non-profits, and cultural sector organizations in Toronto’s wider civil society. This paper reflects on how, for any great city, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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This paper describes the City of Toronto’s financial condition and recent fiscal trends in four areas: spending and services; taxes and revenues; infrastructure; and debt and savings.
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This paper makes the case for a local business tax. The BVT is better than the discriminatory and heavy real property taxes currently levied on businesses in Ontario and other provinces. Moreover, such a tax would be complementary rather than competitive to VATs like the GST and HST.
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Three major trends are pushing us towards an inflection point in provincial-municipal arrangements. Adapting provincial-municipal arrangements to changing circumstances will require a shift in how the two orders of government understand their roles and the nature of their relationships.
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Three major trends are buffeting provincial-municipal arrangements in Ontario. The first is a growing recognition of the role cities and metropolitan regions play as centres of growth and national prosperity. The second is increasing complexity in the provincial-municipal relationship. The third is the emergence of threats to the fiscal health of Ontario municipalities.
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