Excuse the language, my sisters, but Mayor John Tory finally manned up and is now backing a significant property tax increase to finance Toronto’s housing and transit needs.

There is no hiding the Tory Tax. It is large. It is politically tied to the mayor and his legacy. It will cost the average homeowner an extra $43 a year, compounding every year for six years when the hit grows to $280.

The City Building Fund is the right thing to create and finance. Obviously, the political timing is right or Tory wouldn’t propose it now. But, oh, does it ever breed further cynicism and distrust in politicians.

Just over a year ago Tory was re-elected on a platform promising no such tax. In fact, he slammed his opponents and others who seemed open to such a reality. Now, here he is, like a snake, slithering the tax through the bulging budget, disguised as a city saviour.

All that is true. But the culpability lies in all of us who have bought into the deception that we can freeze or cut property taxes each year and run a 21st century burgeoning city, among the fastest growing in North America, the centre of a prosperous GTA region, the repository of the country’s most needy, the refugees and the homeless, and the deviants in disproportionate numbers.

Toronto has the privilege of being Canada’s calling card city. With that comes responsibility for a disproportionate share of costs and services that really have little to do with our property. Yes, property taxes are not properly designed to pay for much of the social costs devolved and downloaded and dumped on cities. But when faced squarely with the needs, the options left us are to tell ratepayers about a property tax hike or tell commuters and the homeless to take a hike.

Citizens must remember this every time a provincial government refuses to allow the mayor the right to impose a toll on the Gardiner or Don Valley Parkway to pay for transit. No tolls inevitably leads to a property tax hike, as we now see.

Torontonians should resist the lure of the province appearing to be on our side in rejecting road tolls. The Kathleen Wynne Liberal government — backed by the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP — rejected the tolls. Instead, Wynne offered $1 billion in gas tax revenues over 10 years. Doug Ford and the Conservatives succeeded Wynne and, just like that, cancelled the gas tax promise.

So, with a $33 billion transit capital need, and tens of thousands on a waiting list for housing, and homeless costs rising, and social housing falling into disrepair, the options are further ruin and chaos or higher property taxes — the main revenue source controlled by the city government.

“We are saving millions a year but we still need billions to build for the future and to invest in maintaining what we have built so far,” Tory said, in announcing the new tax. “I will not as Mayor carry on the old practice of just postponing investments, sometimes indefinitely.”

Citizens and politicians allergic to tax hikes, for any reason, can be expected to rail against the Tory Tax. Those who have looked at the reality of Toronto’s transit and housing needs and have called for such expenditures to the point of being ridiculed, will embrace the day that council votes to support the mayor’s proposal.

But there is no joy in how we got here. And there is little reason to think there are any lessons learned.

Recent and distant history shows that come the 2022 municipal election, mayoral candidates will run on a platform of cutting waste at city hall, freezing taxes and bringing the city’s fiscal house in order. And it will be music to the wilfully blocked ears and darkened eyes of voters who dream of something for nothing.

Like Tory did in 2018, candidates will win favour knowingly promising the impossible, because that’s what taxpayers want to hear.

Like the late Rob Ford did, a mayor will boast about cutting taxes and stopping the gravy train but quietly impose a subway tax on top of current taxes — one that adds $41 a year to the tax bill for nearly 30 years to build a Scarborough subway not supported by ridership projections, but loved by commuters.

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Or, like David Miller did, the mayor will shift a service covered by property taxes (garbage pickup), to a “cost recovery” utility, and force ratepayers to pick up the new utility costs — without reducing their taxes to account for the loss of garbage pickup service on the tax bill.

It’s all so underhanded and devious — inescapably cynical, even — in a system where politicians get elected by telling voters the lies the voter wants to hear from lawmakers the electors don’t trust.

Royson James is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @roysonjames

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