Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
You do realize that the majority of councilors are conservatives. So what you are saying is conservatives don't know how to run things. Hamilton has traditionally had a majority on council of conservatives. While Toronto with the lowest property taxes in the province has been majority left leaning.
Things started to go downhill in this city when the Harris conservative government downloaded responsibilities to the cities without proper funding.
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I'm not sure about the political makeup of city council, but they've had to deal with this problem for about 25 years now. The feds downloaded onto the provinces, and the provinces onto their municipalities... neither senior government providing the means for the "lowest" one to generate enough revenue to pay for all the stuff that was handed down to them!
For an older and well-established city like Hamilton that financial impact was huge, and continues to be. We've dealt with an economic transition and a governance transition. Social too, though we can expect more of that and always should have.
I'm a bit of an optimist, and think our economic transition (which has been VERY difficult, going on four decades now) has begun to turn toward an upswing. That will help with city finances. I think we can and will accommodate the planned population increase, in a mostly sustainable way. But senior government focus on the home runs (battery plants, factories, large investments, etc.) misses all the little things that actually do the most to support the municipal and by extension provincial and national economies... this is where city staff have to be vigilant in a way that the supposedly higher levels are not. And it's what's missing when the Ford gov't says we have to commit to 47,000 new dwellings by 2051. Yeah, we need homes for the people. We need them to be working somewhere too... what's your plan for that Dougie? Doubt the cities will get much help planning and building those houses though, nor for the employment they'll need, if the market doesn't provide that by nature... the pessimist in me sees this as more downloads.