There’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of civic life in Toronto.

On the one hand, the city is booming. People are pouring into the GTA; the downtown core is more vibrant than ever; an unprecedented wave of construction is changing the face of city life; we’ve vaulted into the front rank of urban centres in North America.

At the same time, down at City Hall, our politicians conduct themselves as if they were presiding over a middling burg with an uncertain future. They can’t, or won’t, think big. They shy away from presenting a vision of the future for fear that we, the voters, will turn on them if it involves actually paying a bit more.

This is especially true at budget time, when the wishes of the politicians and the people must be translated into concrete proposals – and backed by actual dollars.

This year is no exception. On Feb. 12-13, city council will vote on a proposed budget that, once again, falls short of what a burgeoning metropolis like Toronto truly needs.

As presented by Mayor John Tory, it increases spending by about 1 per cent to just under $11 billion. It amounts to a status quo budget, enough to maintain current services and add a few more projects favoured by city councillors.

In fact, per capita spending, in real dollars, has actually declined slightly over the past eight years, as city manager Peter Wallace pointed out last fall. Claims from the right that city spending has been allowed to “skyrocket” (in the words of mayoral hopeful Doug Ford) are flat-out wrong.

In the short run, the fight at city council will be over $41-million worth of projects approved by councillors but not included in the budget. They’re things the politicians have committed to doing – but there’s no money attached to turn them into reality.

All are worth doing. They include important initiatives to fight poverty; a more ambitious plan to cut waitlists for social housing and add 1,000 shelter beds for homeless people; introducing a low-income transit pass and a two-hour transfer on the TTC; more action on climate change; setting up an office of Indigenous affairs and a plan to fight anti-Black racism; enhanced library services; and adding badly needed recreational spaces (such as re-opening a couple of neighbourhood pools closed as part of a previous cost-cutting exercise).

The mayor has committed to making sure some of these measures are included in the final budget, which is encouraging. But year after year, councillors are reduced to squabbling at the margins over things that a major city should take for granted. Who really believes that a city the size of Toronto can’t afford to give kids in disadvantaged neighbourhoods a chance to learn to swim?

This is the state of semi-permanent austerity that is the reality of civic life in Toronto. The city simply doesn’t have the money it needs to meet its own commitments, let alone build for the future.

There’s zero chance this will change during this budget cycle, but it’s worth saying the obvious: at some point the city (and its taxpayers) are going to have to face up to the challenges of paying for the needs of a major metropolis.

Mayor Tory gets this, or at least he says he does. “Are we going to get serious about investing in the future we want?” he asked at a major city-building conference in the fall of 2016. “To put it in plain language, are we prepared to pay for the things we know we need to build?”

He then proposed bringing in road tolls, and was immediately shot down by Queen’s Park. Since then, he’s had little to say about closing the gap between what the city needs and what it can afford on its present budget.

The mayor certainly carries a share of the blame for our budget paralysis. Always on guard against a political challenge from the right (coming this election year from Doug Ford), he has held firm to his promise of limiting property tax increases to the rate of inflation. This year’s budget does that again: property taxes will go up by just 2.1 per cent.

But it isn’t just the mayor; there’s plenty of blame to go around. Almost no one, on the right or the left, dares to challenge the political consensus that Toronto’s homeowners should enjoy the lowest property taxes in the entire region, as they do now. Even Olivia Chow, when she campaigned from the left in 2014, made a similar pledge.

This isn’t sustainable. The current budget, as proposed, contains a big bet that Toronto’s housing market will continue to boom – perhaps not at the red-hot pace of last spring, but well above historical trends.

It counts on raising $808 million this year from the land transfer tax (revenue from that tax has quadrupled in four years as property prices soared). If the market levels off and transactions drop, that will be at serious risk. If it crashes, it will blow a big hole in the city’s budget and the toll on services will be ugly.

It’s foolish to rely so heavily on one revenue source that has so much built-in risk. And while it’s fine to go to other levels of government for more cash or explore other potential revenue sources, the city will eventually have to face up to the fact that it can’t afford to give homeowners a perpetual cheap ride.

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Property taxes have been kept so low for so long that there’s room for increases above the rate of inflation. That won’t fix things right away, but over a number of years it will provide the city with a growing, stable source of additional revenue to pay for what we need. Especially when homeowners elsewhere in the GTA are already paying a lot more.

Of course, some people will find it hard to pay more. Seniors, for example, can be shielded by allowing them to defer higher taxes until they sell their homes. But the principle remains: the city needs to find ways to fund its growing needs, and those benefitting most from the property boom should pay a little more.

It’s not a message any politician wants to sell. But it’s one that’s harder to dodge every year as Toronto grapples with the yawning gap between its means and its aspirations.

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