[Therion]

http://www.scotiacapital.com/English/bns_econ/citytorbudget.pdf

I don't know if this has been posted before; I wouldn't be surprised if it has. In that case, mods, feel free to delete the thread. It's an interesting overview by Mary Webb of Scotia Capital of the City of Toronto's finances for 2009 (subtitled Weathering the Economic Downturn).
Some nuggets:

Restraint in wages and salary costs is proving difficult to achieve. Pretty much self-explanatory.

Since Council approved a $6.4 billion Operating Budget in 2003, spending plans have climbed, on average, more than 5% each year. That is an insane increase in spending.

 

[Whoaccio]

Two sort of related topics I'm surprised nobody has posted yet...

Toronto now bedroom community for 905, report finds

If you ask Les Liversidge why he left Toronto for Markham, he is quick to answer: "It was the business taxes, principally the tax bill on the building itself that did it."

Four years ago, the 55-year-old lawyer owned a building in north Toronto out of which he ran a small firm that practised occupational safety and workers' compensation law. His dilemma was property taxes -- they had gone through the roof.

Taxes are one factor -- albeit a major one -- that have helped push the city of Toronto down the list on the FP/ Canadian Federation of Independent Business rankings of entrepreneurial cities. Toronto is now dead last on a list of 96, while suburban Toronto, known as the 905 district, sits at 33. The evidence is clear that businesses, some with a need to stay close to Toronto, are opting for the suburbs.

At one point, Mr. Liversidge said he was paying $4,000 to $6,000 in taxes on the 1½-storey building he occupied from 1992 to 2005, but a new assessment on the property put the tax at $65,000 to $70,000. Increases were capped by legislation but, even with the cap, his bill jumped to $27,000.

He could see the writing on the wall.

Mr. Liversidge owned a property that was only going to get more expensive to run.

There was no decision. He picked up his practice, which includes four employees, and moved to Markham -- about seven kilometres away.

While the city can point to a few real estate projects that show business is still coming to Canada's largest city, the hard statistics show it's moving out to the suburbs.

Real estate company Cushman & Wakefield Ltd. says in 1986 the inventory of office space in the central area of Toronto was 59.7 million square feet.

It has since grown to 82.3 million square feet. By comparison, the suburban market real estate inventory jumped from 38.8 million square feet in 1986 to 83.3 million square feet today.

Judith Andrew, vice-president, legislative with the CFIB, said in her group's rankings Toronto has been slipping because it is not doing well when it comes to policy issues.

The survey scores, which are based on interviews with CFIB members, found respondents giving Toronto low marks for the cost of local government, government sensitivity to local business, local government regulation and local government tax balance.

"One of the problems with Toronto is it has a real penchant for regulating" Ms. Andrews said.

"There are always new regulations in the works. It's not surprising then that Toronto gets a bad rating on regulation."

The survey found 69% of respondents said regulation and paper burden were cause for concern in Toronto. Compare that to Saskatoon, which finished first overall in the survey.

Only 58.2% of respondents in the Saskatchewan city say it's an issue.

"There are a lot of regulations in the city that are not in other municipalities, whether it's restaurant ratings or regulating retail establishments of a certain size having to have a public washroom. On and on it goes, they always have to have a new idea," she said.

The impact has been more and more jobs migrating to the suburbs. "Toronto is becoming the bedroom community for 905," Ms. Andrew said. "Look at the statistics. Unemployment is higher in Toronto than it is outside."

Worse yet, there is very little confidence conditions are going to improve. "The city of Toronto's spending is increasing exponentially," she said. About the only category Toronto does well on in the survey is the diversity of its businesses.

Don't tell anybody at Telus Corp. that Toronto isn't the place to be. The Vancouverbased telecommunications giant is moving into a brand new building called the Telus Tower next month. It will move nearly 2,000 employees into the 30-storey building in the heart of downtown Toronto.

"For us there were two things," said Andrea Goertz, vice-president of enterprise solutions with Telus. "It's very close to our customers, close to the downtown core. It's very convenient to our team members, close to buses and close to the trains."

Telus is moving employees from 15 locations into the new location while it keeps a separate call centre in Scarborough.

The company could have consolidated in the suburbs but for a western-based company trying to make a splash in Toronto, the downtown core will always have a certain cache.

"For us it's a central, high-profile location," Ms. Goertz said.

"It was important that our employees have an environment where they could really thrive with the culture of the city. It was a consideration that played into our decision to be in the downtown core. We want to be part of the presence that is Toronto."

A great City, if you can afford it

Based on the Big Mac index alone, Toronto is a good place to hang your hat. UBS, the Swiss bank, compared 73 cities and calculates that it takes the average Torontonian 12 minutes to earn enough money to buy a Big Mac, a statistic that ties us with Chicago and Tokyo. In Paris, the average worker must toil 20 minutes to acquire the iconic burger, compared with 36 minutes in Singapore, and close to four hours in Nairobi.

My first thought here is why in heck anyone in Paris should want to eat a Big Mac, given the culinary choices of that town; still, it's nice we have at least something on those snobs. The Toronto Community Foundation includes the Big Macindex in its Vital Signs Report, its eighth annual roundup of statistics from about 150 sources, which it is releasing this morning. (I got a sneak peek yesterday.)

On the Bohemian Index --a measure of whether a region has more or fewer professional artistically creative people than the average region -- Toronto scores third among its North American peers (ahead of Seattle, Boston and Chicago and just behind Vancouver and Los Angeles). The ranking, compiled by the ubiquitous Richard Florida, "is linked to Toronto's relative openness and tolerance, which in turn is associated with the region's ability to flourish in an age that demands high creativity and innovation," the report says.

That's the good news; all told the report makes for some depressing reading. Garbage is piling up, gridlock is worse, homeless are cramming shelters, immigrants can't find work or a home they can afford; youth are lazing around after school and putting on weight; and 42,000 people collected Employment Insurance in Toronto between May 2008 and May 2009, almost double the total of a year earlier.

Fundamentally, the report concludes that Toronto is "highly desirable but seriously unaffordable." We are rich: average household net worth is $526,000, second only to Vancouver. But we are ranked 29th in Canada in terms of the affordability of a house.

The Foundation began compiling the report in 2001 to aid it with philanthropic work; as the manager of about $200-million in endowments, the organization seeks to spend its money in ways that will help all of our 2.6 million citizens succeed. The report focuses on the 47% of Torontonians who are visible minorities. These citizens are sliding increasingly into poverty, the report says, because they can't find the jobs for which they were trained back home. That could spell trouble down the road.

"We're creating an inhospitable environment," says Rahul Bhardwaj, chief executive of the foundation. "People are coming here looking for a better life. In too many ways, we're not making good on that promise. The new head tax is that we entice foreign professionals to come here and then we don't allow them to ply their profession."

What this all leads to is a division between the city centre, which is largely white and affluent, and the inner suburbs of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. Mr. Bhardwaj, 47, drew a cross on the paper in front of him, labelling the centre as the corner of Yonge and Bloor streets, which is right outside his office window. He tapped the centre.

''The further away you get from here, the darker and poorer you get," he observes. Born in London, England, and educated in London, Ont., he himself has bucked the trend, landing an enviable job and living in the Beach, one of the nicest parts of town. Still, the statistics suggest his story is not the norm. Immigrant women are especially challenged. In 1980, the report says, an immigrant woman earned 85¢ for every dollar earned by a Canadian-born woman; by 2005 that total slid to 56¢.
All this talk of the Big Mac index made me crave one, so I walked down to the corner of Yonge and Charles streets, where a McDonald's occupies the grand stone edifice that formerly housed Postal Station "F." Melinda, a smiling Asian woman in her late forties, sold me a Big Mac for $4.74. I found myself wondering whether, in coming from her homeland to Canada, she wanted to end up at the counter of a burger chain.

 

[Whoaccio]

Shouldn't Miller et al, or anyone for that matter, spend more time talking about these issues? Anemic employment growth is sort of a fundamental challenge to the City, and one that disproportionately hurts the poorest, so it should be a favorite cause of most of the Toronto political spectrum. It usually takes a back seat to issues which are, in the grand scheme of things, cosmetic like a Pride Parade or CondoNIMBYism though. Not that those aren't important, but why the hell do we spend so much time trying to regulate drive throughs or mandate green roughs when we have some reasonably worrying pools of poverty?