There’s a simple solution for alleged funding problems for sewer and water networks: have the user pay, just like they do for internet. If usage fees cover repairs as well as future upgrades and expansion, bottlenecks won’t occur. Municipal governments, on the other hand, prefer to wait for “others”, namely provincial and federal taxpayers, to pony up for things they don’t want to charge local voters for.
She said municipalities largely rely on property taxes and user fees for revenue, which account for roughly one-tenth of total government revenues in Canada despite them being responsible for a majority of core local infrastructure.
“We know what we need to do,” she said. “The concern is we don’t have the fiscal capacity to do it at the speed and scale that housing targets require.”
The problem is that the tax take is too high at the federal level and too low at the provincial and municipal level. The funding should be as close to where the “services” are provided as possible….otherwise there is little accountability and people get the wrong idea that another level of government is “giving you something”.
Federal taxes should be cut WAY back and the tax room handed over to the provincial government which can then make their own decisions on how to push down their tax room to the municipalities. And then hold each level of government accountable for what they are to provide. That takes out the mushy middle.
“…have the user pay, just like they do for internet.”
Bold of you to assume they won’t just steal the money the users pay, Dennis.
Funding problems for municipal services are down to:
1) Outright theft
2) Corruption
3) the most appalling incompetence you could ever imagine
That the system works at all is mostly down to generations of honest men who installed everything up to roughly the 1970s. After that, things get super sketchy. I worked for a gas pipeline outfit in the ’80s. I saw some things, let’s just say. Inspectors received a nice bottle of Scotch periodically, know what I mean?
Talk to an experienced pipefitter about the sewer and water shenanigans going on in new construction and maintenance of old systems. You think it was an accident Calgary got flooded? It wasn’t.
You forgot wasting scads of money on useless things like commissioning sculptures and artworks, painting pride colors on streets, replacing perfectly functional street lights with ones that don’t cause light pollution, mothballing diesel buses with a lot of life in them with EVs, etc. etc.
And that is exactly the kind of thing that would stop when it became clear to taxpayers that the federal or provincial cavalry isn’t going to come to bail them out because they pissed away taxpayer money on crap like that. We are living that nonsense in Calgary now with our water system which was deliberately neglected over the years, but much more so when Nenshi and Gondek were ruining (no, that’s not a spelling mistake) the city.
“Sherwood said development charges in parts of the Greater Toronto Area can reach $130,000 to $140,000 per unit, much of it tied to the cost of water and wastewater infrastructure needed to support new housing.”
https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/9709-DC-Rates-June-26-2025.pdf
Sherwood is a moron if he thinks that most of the development charges are going to infrastructure such as water and sewage. Take for example the $137k+ for a single or semi detached dwelling, of that number, $4.5k goes to water hookup, and $11,193 goes to sanitary sewer. Both of those are less than the $50k+ for transit expansion, or the $20k that goes to Parks and Rec. Barely 12% of the fee is going to water and wastewater.