Honestly sick of the dependency that municipalities and regional authorities have on the feds. They should be building transit themselves. If they can't make the business case work, maybe they should stop allowing sprawl.
The feds are finally building infrastructure that has national level impact. As they should have been doing for the last few decades.
With respect, Ontario municipalities have very few tax tools outside of property tax.
I agree with the theory of disentanglement, although, GO Transit is a provincial agency as it stands, and there is not a municipal level of government that covers its area.
That said.........if you provide every city with sales tax or income tax, you could absolutely do this...............
But very few governments around the world do this.........
The national gov't of France finances subway expansion in Paris, The Spanish gov't in Madrid and the UK gov't in London.
Equally the U.S. uses this same mechanism to finance transit expansion in NYC
Making this out as a uniquely Canadian phenomena isn't correct. And needless to say, its not uniquely Ontarian either.
Senior levels of gov't tend to resist sharing income-based taxes or sales-based taxes with cities/regions.
Even when they do........there are challenges..........whose sales tax should have paid for a subway expansion to Vaughan that Toronto did not support?
Who pays to operate that subway?
Its all more complex than you're making out.
I agree w/your theory...........but ragging on people for suggesting that the existing formula should fund their desired projects (assuming they otherwise make sense}, where there really is no other option on the table seems a bit much.
