Hold on, that’s not right. Gene Kelly’s memorable song-and-dance routine in the 1952 film “Singin’ in the Rain” had nothing to do with taxation!
While it appeared Toronto’s mayor had simply taken a page out of the political left’s general playbook with a rain tax, it didn’t come completely out of left field.
This idea originated with Toronto city staffers in 2013, when Rob Ford was mayor, after a few significant rainstorms and floods. It reared its ugly head once more in 2017 when John Tory was mayor, and again in 2021.
Which led to the proposal that Chow recently considered. As she quickly discovered, a plan to tax the rain was viewed as being all wet.
Property owners, including individuals and businesses, are regularly billed for water use. In Toronto, the current domestic rate is roughly $4.51 per cubic metre for the first 5,000 cubic metres. Once this maximum has been surpassed, property owners pay an industrial rate of $3.16 per cubic metre.
A rain tax would have been a foolish, unnecessary, and costly expense for Toronto property owners, as it would have been for any community toying with similar plans. Canadians already pay more than enough personal and corporate income taxes each year. Many individuals and families are also suffering badly during the affordability crisis that has raised the cost of living from bare essentials to home ownership.
Hence, a tax on the rain—which is exactly what it would have entailed, in spite of the Toronto mayor and her defenders suggesting otherwise—would have even been regarded by Mother Nature as a cruel joke.
This would have been bad enough, but there’s more.
Toronto city staffers went as far as to claim that water rates for property owners would fall by 25 percent, or $385 million. How? A 10-year rolling capital plan that currently manages sewers and tunnels throughout the city could have been removed from water bills, leading to overall cost savings for taxpayers.
I’m sorry, but it’s not even remotely believable that stormwater management funds could be removed with the introduction of a new rain tax. Left-wing politicians like Chow and like-minded city councillors don’t believe in eliminating government interference and tax revenue as a rule of thumb. The more likely scenario is they would have taken the rolling capital plan, which has already been earmarked into the city’s tax coffers, and shifted it in another direction or to aid another program. The rain tax would therefore become a new expense that no Toronto property owner would ever have clamoured for.
There’s only one realistic way to decrease or eliminate Toronto’s rolling capital plan for stormwater management. The city could have devise a new contract for a private firm to manage its sewers and tunnels at a significantly reduced rate. The contract would have been put out to tender, and city hall would have voted on the winning bid.
This scenario was never going to materialize, either. Chow and her merry little band of left-leaning city councillors don’t exactly have much faith in the private sector.
This led Chow to quickly come to the realization, like Ford and Tory before her, that a rain tax would never fly in Toronto. All it would have done is cause stormy weather for her mayor’s office and future re-election bid.
