Some of us — including me, some panelists at a recent Empire Club discussion, and Matt Elliott in a recent column — have wondered where the grand ideas are in this mayoral campaign. But watching Tuesday night’s debate from the moderator’s podium, I wondered if we’d spoken too soon.
Because Olivia Chow and Brad Bradford have introduced some pretty major and possibly transformative platform planks that we haven’t really heard in Toronto politics before, if you stop to take a look at them.
Olivia Chow has already introduced a morning meal program in Toronto schools. Now she’s proposing free school lunches. As a parent who has co-managed the lunches of three students, I can say it was among the most frustrating parts of our day for a long time. And as someone who moved those children to a U.S. state where school lunches were automatically served to every student, I can attest to how important it was as an anti-poverty support for many children (enough so that lunch programs continued to feed students during pandemic school shutdowns). Shellene Drakes-Tull wrote about why she sees this promise as a great one. It was a promise Chris Alexander also made, before he dropped out. But I don’t think I’d ever heard any candidate even suggest it as a notion before this year.
Brad Bradford lauds the school breakfast program Chow built as “one of the best things this city does.” But he raises an objection to Chow’s promise of a free lunch. “It’s an idea without a plan to pay for it.” Fair enough.
But maybe that brings us to what I think is the flashiest promise on Bradford’s list: the plan to eliminate the land transfer tax on homes selling for less than $1.1 million. For anyone buying an average-priced home in Toronto, this could potentially save them more than $18,000.
What’s more, I think there may be a strong argument, based on fairness, that it’s worthwhile and possibly overdue. When the land transfer tax was introduced in 2008, the threshold at which it fully applied was set at $400,000 because that was just above the average home price in the city at the time (according to the Star archives, a buyer of a $380,000 average home at the time would pay about $3,500 to the city). Those rates haven’t been adjusted, even as house prices have radically outpaced inflation.
But — and this is a big but — this is one of the most expensive promises anyone has made in my memory of city politics. Bradford himself estimates forgone city revenue at about $300 million per year. By comparison, that is more than our entire library system costs to run each year. The net cost of Toronto’s paramedic service is only $175 million. How is Bradford going to pay for that? His proposal, that dividends from a new water utility would cover it, strikes some as dubious, if not fanciful. “This is not a real plan,” a spokesperson for Chow’s campaign said.
So: two big but very different policy proposals. One focused on what families get from the city, one focused on what families pay to the city. Both accused of being potentially financially impractical.
What do you think? Which of these proposals resonates more with you? Which do you think is more practical? Is either of them changing how you think about your own vote? Let us know in the comments section here.
