It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It is not because we know how it will end that it is not interesting to watch… Likewise, it is not because the confrontation between the Legault government and the mayors was predictable that we are not must not listen to the demands of the cities.
It was predictable that the Prime Minister would reject out of hand the request to reopen the municipal taxation file so that cities would no longer be so dependent on the ineffective and outdated instrument that is the property tax. All his predecessors did.
It was much less so that Minister Lionel Carmant lectured mayors by telling them to lower their voices, as one does with turbulent teenagers. Especially since the mayor of Gatineau, France Bélisle, reported a particularly disturbing and completely intolerable situation involving a homeless woman who had to give birth alone in a wooded area.
One wonders why the Legault government is seeking a confrontation with the municipalities, especially since their demands align with the priorities of the Quebec government.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Minister Lionel Carmant lectured the mayors by telling them to lower their voices, as one does with turbulent teenagers.
The Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, said this week in an interview with The Press that he would have three priorities for the next year: housing, homelessness and adaptation to climate change. These are also the priorities of the mayors.
The problem with cities is that they do not have the tools they need to intervene properly in the face of these problems. For decades, mayors have been saying that property taxes are no longer an instrument suited to their new responsibilities.
The property tax was a good instrument for providing services to property: street maintenance, the water network, snow removal, garbage management, etc. When we have to deal with homelessness or adapting to climate change, we far exceed the financial capacity of municipalities.
Today, the property tax is less and less attractive for cities. In the digital world, we need less and less real estate. Many services are delivered without having an office.
But municipalities now have to deal with issues related to provincial jurisdictions such as social services. When these are overwhelmed, it is the front-line municipal services, starting with the police, who must intervene.
Cities don’t have the resources to deal with mental health or addiction issues. But, in reality, they very often have no choice.
All of this means that the dismissal that the mayors received from Prime Minister Legault becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
Cities released figures this week that clearly show how under-resourced they are. Over the last decade (2013-2022), city property revenues have increased by 29.3%. During the same period, the federal government’s revenues increased by 50.3% and the Quebec government’s revenues increased by 95.1%.
In addition, cities are used to seeing the Quebec government – whatever its political color – sending new responsibilities into the hands of municipalities.
Older people remember the Ryan reform, in the early 1990s, when the Bourassa government literally took back control of public finances by transferring, without compensation, all kinds of bills to the cities. More recently, in 2020, the CAQ government forced cities to give up the land required for the construction of new schools for free.
So it is not correct to say that the mayors only want a transfer of millions of dollars from Quebec to the cities.
What is needed is to end the reliance of cities on property tax alone. And it is a little too easy to accuse cities of bad administration when we deny them the tools that would allow them to have better governance.
It has been repeated a little too often this week that the mayors are becoming the real opposition to the CAQ government. It is true that the new cohort of mayors is largely made up of mayors – and increasingly female mayors – who are more progressive than the current government and more sensitive to the social problems experienced in their cities than to accounting issues.
But the mayors are not aiming for a political fight against the government of Quebec, they want a tax reform which has become essential with the new problems they must deal with.
We can no longer talk seriously about the fight against homelessness, social housing or the adaptation of infrastructure to climate change if we do not ensure that the cities, which are on the front line, have the resources to participate.