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Originally Posted by Phil McAvity
On that note I got into a disagreement with a guy over PM's here and he threatened to report me
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Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue
So what's going on? Did PC download healthcare to be a municipal responsibility now? I heard the news but didn't quite get it.
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Municipalities paid between 0% and 25% of the healthcare costs in their jurisdictions. (This was a funding transfer they made to their district health units or LHINs or something.) Now, all municipalities will pay 30% of the healthcare costs in their jurisdictions. Provincial transfers to municipalities are also being cut 5%, so municipal governments are looking at being forced to shift a significant chunk of their budgets onto property taxes, or cut a lot of things entirely.
But on top of all of this, a lot of the information with regards to provincial funding levels has not yet been provided, when usually it's all submitted in mid-summer, so municipalities are not even able to start the budget process right now (which would normally be half-way through by now) because they don't actually know how much money they have access to to build a budget in the first place. It's about to get seriously fucked up.
This government is truly dysfunctional, and when they ask for clarification the responses they get are either non-responses or threats of more cuts. We could be looking at municipal property tax increases in the double digits across the board in the new few months, especially in the smaller communities that didn't have to pay for health care until recently and are now being forced to pay for 30% of it.
My advice to the city was to do everything they can to brand this for what it is: provincial download tax.
Ontario is, essentially, shifting its tax burden from income to property values.