Whoops. Has Kathleen Wynne’s grand plan to rebuild Greater Toronto’s public transit system just gone off the rails?

The Ontario premier insists it hasn’t. But her promise not to raise taxes on the middle class to finance bus, subway or streetcar improvements has made the task far more difficult.

On Thursday, she ruled out hiking gas taxes and the HST. She also said she won’t raise income taxes on what she called middle-income earners.

These three levies account for 55 per cent of the province’s own-source revenue from taxes, fees and Crown corporations.

So. Not much room to manoeuvre if the minority Liberal government still wants to continue with an ambitious 25-year transit plan for the Toronto and Hamilton area, one that is estimated to cost $50 billion.

In December, an advisory panel recommended that in order to accomplish this so-called Big Move, Queen’s Park should raise taxes by about $1.7 billion a year, cadge more money from Ottawa and borrow the rest.

“This conversation (about raising taxes) does not scare me,” Wynne had said earlier.

Still, with the spectre of an election looming, it’s no surprise that she eventually walked away from broadly based tax hikes. Some 35 years after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher first began demonizing taxes, politicians are still running scared.

Tom Mulcair’s federal New Democrats have said no to any personal income tax hikes, even on the rich.

Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has gone one step further. He’s promised not to raise any taxes at all, including corporate taxes.

Andrea Horwath’s provincial NDP opposes any levy that might hit what she calls “middle-class families.”

Parties on the centre-left take these positions in the face of evidence provided by any number of experts who point out that public services can work only if the public funds them.

Tax is not a four-letter word, as public policy analysts Alex and Jordan Himelfarb entitled their recent book.

The NDP, federally and provincially, do talk of hiking corporate taxes. Horwath’s NDP also supported a new surtax on the rich imposed two years ago by Ontario’s Liberal government.

But history shows that corporations and the wealthy are adept at evading taxes. Multinationals do it through creative accounting. Rich individuals move to low-tax jurisdictions.

Ontario’s new surtax on the wealthy, for instance, is expected to hit only 23,000 individuals and bring in just $470 million annually. And that’s the optimistic scenario.

The sad truth is that if middle-class voters want public services, they must be willing to pay for them — either now or later.

At some level, people do understand this. Former premier Dalton McGuinty famously broke his no-tax-hike promise soon after being elected in 2003. But he portrayed this tax increase as a way to fund health care.

After some grumbling, voters accepted the idea — largely, I think, because they appreciated medicare and knew it worked.

Wynne says she has a plan to fund transit and maybe she has. Given the weakened state of the Ontario economy, it does make sense to postpone any broadly based tax increases until matters improve.

With interest rates at bargain-basement levels, it would also make sense for Queen’s Park to fund the Big Move almost entirely through borrowing.

Doing that, however, would increase debt and deficit, another political no-no in these still Thatcherite times.

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And eventually, the middle class would still have to ante up the cash.

Because that’s the reality of good public services. They are worthwhile. But they cost money.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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