What’s New at IMFG

The 2020–2021 IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow, Julie Mah, was featured in a CBC online story about her paper on Evictions in Toronto where she called for more collaboration and data sharing between the province and the city.

As part of the “Beyond Local: Bridging the Municipal Funding Gap” series, Airdrie Today quoted IMFG Director Enid Slack on how municipal responsibilities are changing while revenue sources remain the same.

IMFG Director Enid Slack appeared in both St. Albert Today and the Toronto Star to discuss the impact of newly downloaded RCMP costs on small Alberta budgets.

Doug Anderson and IMFG Fellow Alexandra Flynn co-authored an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail summarizing the arguments from their IMFG Paper, Indigenous-Municipal Legal and Governance Relationships.

IMFG Director Enid Slack discussed the Ontario Chamber of Commerce report on the fiscal resilience of Ontario municipalities for Novae Res Urbis, stating that the province should get out of property taxes so that there would be more revenue for municipalities.

IMFG Director Enid Slack commented in Alberta’s St. Albert Today on the “visibility” of property taxes as a deterrence to municipalities to raise them.

IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow Julie Mah’s preliminary research on Section 37 and Affordable Housing in Toronto was discussed in an article in the Globe and Mail (paywall). It reported that only 1.5 per cent of new dwellings built in Ontario between 1996 and 2017 include affordability commitments. She presented her findings in a July 13, 2021 seminar […]

IMFG Fellow Alexandra Flynn co-authored an opinion piece on how to get cities out of their constitutional straitjacket for Policy Options.

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Richard Bird, Senior Fellow at IMFG and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Richard was enthusiastic about IMFG from its creation in 2004 and lent his support and encouragement by publishing papers […]

IMFG Director Enid Slack and IMFG Manager of Programs & Research Tomas Hachard have co-authored a new article for Policy Options on the need for municipalities to be given more control over revenue sources with more fiscal flexibility, and treated as full partners in Canadian federalism.