StillPaisleyCat
I feel as though the entire point of this was to make Canadians feel ashamed and discouraged on the day before our national holiday.
And in that Trump was successful. It’s brutal and bullying propaganda.
No success of realpolitik in negotiations can undo that.
The business community and media were calling the digital services tax an unforced error.
But the real unforced error is Carney getting played to do something destructive to national unity heading into Canada Day.
This is one of the few cases where his lack of political experience is showing. I’m wondering if his team will let him understand that and see the polling impact.
Do you have a Canadian ancestor?
The 2023 Bjorkquist decision overturned the first generation limit to pass down citizenship. There is an Interim measure to accept applications for special grants of citizenship beyond one generation and there is a bill in Parliament to put in place a remedy to address the findings of the Superior Court of Ontario (which the federal government has not appealed).
My point is that the principle of existing homeowners funding infrastructure for new homes is only tenable when
- developers are not creating huge externalities by creating ever larger suburbs with infrastructure funded by the core (take Ottawa as an example for that dynamic)
- when the base of established homeowners is large enough to support the rate of growth.
In the first case, development fees based on lot size for new sprawling burbs are a reasonable way to push the market towards density.
In the second case, with a high rate of growth in a specific market, other means of redistribution such as government subsidies may be a better way to redistribute.
We’re in Ottawa, so that may be an exception, but generally here it’s been extraordinarily expensive to develop the suburbs beyond the greenbelt, and until the development fees were increased in the late 90s, studies showed that new homeowners only bore about 1/5th of the cost.
Much of the development classification from farmland was effectively unplanned and forced through by suburban municipal councils before the amalgamation in the 1990s.
The costs of extending utilities across the National Capital Commission lands was extraordinary and no one inside the greenbelt benefited. A major bridge had to be built because the traffic impact was not considered etc.
There have been more recent improvements such as the retroactive construction of separate wastewater and storm water systems in the core that benefit everyone by keeping sewage out of the rivers.
The O-train construction unfortunately has been a burden on all without the benefits that should come with a modern rapid transit system.
We live in a society - yes.
But that’s the reason many of the development fees were put in back in the 1970s and 80s - there were significant equity issues where the exponentially growing new shiny suburbs were built on the property taxes of a much smaller base of urban homeowners who were left with old, inferior and unmaintained city infrastructure.
So, let’s seriously consider whether what the equity issues are now and whether those fees are reasonable cost recovery for infrastructure vs a tax cash grab - or if there’s enough of a base of established homeowners that they could carry the development costs for new homes through reasonable tax increases.
