Sewage treatment, light rapid transit, E&N railway and now bicycle infrastructure equal lots of dollars. Why we get excited when senior levels of government (read other taxpayers) are going to pitch in, I don’t understand.
It’s still going to have a huge impact on not only property taxes, but any tax they can increase or new fee they can create, like bicycle licensing, maybe? Bicycling is last form of transportation with no taxes, except the HST on the purchase, and in doing so would create a real disincentive to riding a bike.
Not mentioned much is annual maintenance costs that will increase year over year. New parks, new planter boxes in the middle of the roads, new recreation and cultural centres, as nice as they are, come with increasingly expensive annual operating costs. And all these new projects are going to increase it substantially.
Present and future taxpayers are going to be hit hard. Property owners won’t be the only ones affected. Renters will be too. The government will have to allow landlords to raise rents to offset the extraordinary increase in taxes over and above the present rate, otherwise it won’t be worth being a landlord.
Take a look around. You can’t go anywhere, where the roads aren’t cracked, pot-holed and in some places crumbling, and they want to build a 21st century state of the art everything else.
Bob Broughton
Victoria