Three Toronto mayoral campaign promises that are never kept

High-profile election campaigns are a time for politicians to make flashy and shamelessly attention-grabby campaign promises. There’s no avoiding it. But it’d be nice if those campaign promises were rooted in something resembling reality.

Maybe that’s asking too much. With Toronto’s mayoral election heating up, top candidates already seem too eager to throw out all kinds of promises, even if they don’t really jive with the facts.

Let’s look at just a few examples of things nobody should be promising.

Keeping property taxes low. There’s a familiar refrain on this issue. Olivia Chow says she’ll keep property tax revenue increases around the rate of inflation. John Tory says he’ll make the city affordable. Mayor Rob Ford thinks taxes are literally the devil.  And so on...

Nobody wants to talk about increasing taxes, but the reality of Toronto’s financial situation going into 2015 makes any claim of keeping property taxes at or below the rate of inflation immediately suspect.  Whoever gets elected in October will have to deal with a deep budget hole, made worse by the loss of $86-million in provincial funding, a $12-million bill for the Scarborough subway fund and declining end-of-year operating surpluses.

Anyone who says they want to keep property taxes low will first have to explain how they’ll deal with that mess.

Building lots of transit quickly, without taxes. For decades, Torontonians have heard from politicians who promise they can build large-scale transit infrastructure using only existing government revenues. And for decades, pretty much nothing has happened.

We’ve got to stop falling for this.

The truth is that there is no quick fix for Toronto’s transit issues. Extra bus service will be nice, but won’t do the trick. Neither will trumped-up calls for a subway relief line that don’t come with a credible funding strategy.

Any candidate being truly honest with voters about transit will have to say a bunch of things campaign strategists hate. They’ll have to say that building real transit improvements takes a long time and costs a ton of money — money that may have to come in the form of new or increased taxes.

Creating lots of jobs. All the mayoral candidates will talk about creating jobs, but this is a path fraught with peril. Ford tried to take credit for Toronto’s falling unemployment rate last year, only to watch it shoot back up.

Realistically, municipal politicians don’t really have the power to create jobs in the short term. What they can do is help create the long-term conditions for increased employment, through infrastructure programs, cultural programs, social programs like child care, affordable housing, a fully-costed plan to deliver dramatically improved public transit.

So, hey, how about making some campaign promises about those kinds of things?