TORONTO

Mayor Rob Ford refused to rule out just burying a recommended list of new taxes and tolls to fund transit.

Ford’s executive committee meets Tuesday to determine whether to endorse the imposition of slapping development charges, a fuel tax, a parking levy and a sales tax on Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area residents to raise revenue for transit construction.

Councillors are also being asked to throw their support behind implementing high occupancy toll lanes, highway tolls or other road pricing and a vehicle registration tax after 2020 once more transit projects have been completed.

“I personally won’t be supporting it,” Ford said Monday. “I know a couple of my executive members aren’t going to support it but I can’t speak for the rest of them right now. It very well could get filed.”

Ford stressed he’s already laid out a transit plan for the city before the revenue tools debate emerged.

“We had our transit plan and this council failed to adopt it,” he said. “We’ll see in the next election — it is going to be a huge election issue and we’ll take it from there.”

Councillor Paula Fletcher said shelving the revenue tools report rather than sending it on to council for debate would be “embarrassing” for the city.

“We have to deal with it one way or another. The head-in-the-sand approach really needs to end,” Fletcher said.

Councillor David Shiner — a member of Ford’s executive committee — said he won’t support any new revenue tools and hoped the report wouldn’t go on to city council.

Shiner argued the provincial government has benefited financially from Toronto’s condo boom.

“To tell us now that you have to go ahead and have all these new fees when you’ve collected the money and in my opinion spent the money in the wrong areas paying for gas-generation plants that you never built, paying for helicopters that you never needed, trying to build an eHealth system that never worked,” Shiner said.

“To come back and say, ‘Oh, we need money to build transit.’ You have the money to build transit.”

Councillor Norm Kelly said a sales tax would be the “fairest” way to raise money for transit construction.

“At this point, I would urge my fellow members on the executive committee to look at least one source of revenue and that is the sales tax.”