Search Results for: Perspectives Paper

Canadian cities are on the front lines addressing and dealing with the impacts of Canada’s major policy challenges, including the COVID-19 crisis. However, they remain “little siblings” in Canadian federalism, often ignored by the federal government or overruled by the provinces. This paper examines four specific challenges cities face because of this situation, as well as two fundamental steps that can be taken to address the imbalance in Canadian governance and fiscal relations.
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The paper suggests that community consultation be integrated into the earliest stages of the planning process to ensure that such plans proceed into the expensive construction process with much broader support.
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This paper describes the experience of some of Mexico’s largest cities in implementing nationally mandated urban growth policies, in particular the top-down nature of these new policies and the lack of local consultation in their implementation.
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The coronavirus pandemic has thrown into relief a range of health, social, and economic challenges for municipalities in the Greater Toronto region. These challenges – such as lack of affordable housing, income inequality, the need to spur economic development, and the impact of climate change – all spill across municipal boundaries and need to be addressed through cooperation and coordination at the regional scale.
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This paper examines the current state of property tax policy across Canada and finds that municipalities and provinces are facing a number of shared challenges and questions, including: whether to apply progressive property tax rates, the volatility of property taxes, the benefits and drawbacks of using property tax incentives to attract businesses, and the role of provincial property taxes
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Toronto is an emerging global city. Yet the failure to build rapid transit in step with the explosive growth of the past 40 years is one of the city-region’s biggest impediments to inclusive development and prosperity. This paper outlines how transit planning in the Greater Toronto Area can be improved through changes to governance and the role of evidence in decision-making.
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This paper examines the evolution of Mexico City’s governance structure. The City’s latest transition to a city-state, the paper argues, marks a particularly important step forward in the City’s pursuit of greater political autonomy and democratic decision-making.
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The property tax generates a significant proportion of municipal revenues in Canada and has done so since Confederation. This paper makes the case that the property tax is a good tax for funding local (especially general-purpose) governments for several reasons: the base of the tax is immovable; the tax can generate reliable and sufficient revenues and make local governments independent from other orders of government; many of the core goods and services provided by local governments directly benefit property owners; the tax is visible to property owners; and the tax is easy to administer.
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