Affordable housing, need for new fiscal model dominate FCM meeting
More than 1,500 municipal elected officials gathered in Toronto, May 25-28, for the 2023 FCM annual conference. Photo: Rebekah Rickwood
Two intersecting issues dominated this past weekend’s Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) annual conference: the need for a new fiscal framework, and affordable housing and homelessness.
More than 1,500 municipal elected officials gathered at the FCM meeting to engage with national party leaders and to shape the organization’s policy priorities through a series of workshops and plenaries. It seemed every municipality represented at the FCM meeting, large or small, from every part of the country, indicated that they were grappling with affordable housing and the constraints of the current system of raising revenues mostly through property taxes.
Need for New Fiscal Model
Enid Slack, Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, taking part in a workshop on fiscal framework, said municipalities are labouring under a revenue model based on property taxes that was set up under the Baldwin Act of 1849.
Yet today municipalities are being loaded up with issues ranging from settling refugees to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, as well as a collective municipal infrastructure deficit of $175 billion. Slack posed the question to delegates, “are municipalities fiscally sustainable going forward?”
The answer is clear to Halifax Mayor Mike Savage, who also serves as chair of FCM’s Big City Mayor’s Caucus (BCMC). “Municipalities across the country are constrained by a fiscal framework that is not designed to empower local governments to drive local solutions at the scale needed in 2023 and beyond,” he said.
Savage said municipalities have no ability to get their respective provincial governments to even consider changing the current model. “It’s like chickens in the slaughter house asking Colonel Saunders for a new deal. They have no leverage.”
Federal Support for Municipal Issues
Ahmed Hussen, Canada’s Minister for Housing, Diversity and Inclusion, met with the BCMC to discuss housing affordability and the related issue of chronic homelessness, focussing his remarks on the government’s $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund that has a target of 100,000 new homes by 2024-25.
The mayors emerged from the meeting and expressed hope that the federal government is at least sympathetic to the fiscal situation of municipalities.
“We need to fix this broken system of fiscality because it puts us in the situation where cities are always needing and always asking for things here and there,” said Valérie Plante, Mayor of Montreal, who is vice-chair of the caucus along with Charlie Clark, Mayor of Saskatoon.
“We are looking for a vision, and we are looking for recognition that we are partners,” said Plante. “That’s what we do. We fix things, we find solutions, and we want a working partnership instead of begging.”
Trudeau Engages with FCM
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a speech to delegates, gave a sneak peak of a national infrastructure plan that is in the works and to be announced in the fall. The plan, he said, will have “very direct links to housing.”
The federal government in 2021 announced $15 billion over eight years on public transportation projects. At FCM, Trudeau said incentives in the new infrastructure plan will be similar to those in the already announced transit plan.
“Access to full funding will rely on you coming to the table with concrete and ambitious commitments on how you’re going to build more housing to go with more transit,” Trudeau said. “This means that, just like the Housing Accelerator Fund, the more ambitious your housing targets, the more generous we’ll be able to be in partnering with you.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre did not appear at the FCM meeting and instead sent a member of his caucus to speak. In contrast, Trudeau spent an extraordinary amount of time at FCM. In addition to his speech, he met behind the scenes with FCM executive members and attended a reception to meet delegates one on one.
In his speech, Trudeau took a direct swipe at Poilievre for his announced policy of penalizing large municipalities if they fail to increase home building by 15 percent per year. “They want to pick fights with you, to bully you into what they decide for you, while they cut funding and programs,” Trudeau said.
Singh, May Address Delegates
Trudeau was one of three party leaders to address the FCM meeting, the others being Jagmeet Singh, Leader of the New Democratic Party, and Elizabeth May, Co-Leader of the Green Party.
“I would like to suggest that we need to fix the federation and we don’t want to open the Constitution to do it,” May said in her speech to the FCM meeting. “The idea that municipalities, towns, and cities are the creatures of provinces and have no identity or political role outside that, does not work.”
“The most unifying single issue is the need for housing,” Singh said in a fireside-chat style interview. “We need to build. We need to build fast, and we need to build everywhere.” MW
✯ Municipal World Executive and Essentials Plus Members: You might also be interested in Greg Crone’s article: Big city mayors seek new fiscal deal with Ottawa, provinces.
Greg Crone is Executive Editor of Municipal World
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