{"id":21713,"date":"2016-09-17T15:18:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T20:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21713"},"modified":"2016-09-17T15:18:01","modified_gmt":"2016-09-17T20:18:01","slug":"torontos-land-transfer-tax-revenue-is-booming-but-the-cupboards-still-bare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21713","title":{"rendered":"Toronto’s land transfer tax revenue is booming, but the cupboard’s still bare"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Toronto’s land transfer tax revenue is booming, but the cupboard’s still bare<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

‘The message to Toronto is, ‘Don’t spend it all,’ economist says<\/p>\n

\"Toronto's<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Toronto’s red-hot real estate market has sent municipal land transfer tax revenues soaring. But the city’s spending all that money, not saving it. (Sean Kilpatrick\/Canadian Press)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In times of plenty, it can be easy to forget there may be leaner years ahead.<\/p>\n

But Toronto city council and its city managers need only look westward for a\u00a0cautionary tale about relying on a volatile source of revenue;\u00a0here,\u00a0it’s\u00a0the municipal land transfer tax\u00a0\u2014 but in Alberta it was oil.<\/p>\n

Plunging oil prices have taken their toll on\u00a0provincial revenues\u00a0\u2014 down to $1.4 billion this year, from a high of more than $10 billion. That’s a glimpse of what could happen in Toronto\u00a0when the housing bubble eventually bursts, real estate economist Frank Clayton says.<\/p>\n

Unless, however,\u00a0we\u00a0choose to follow Norway’s example<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"City<\/p>\n

City Manager Peter Wallace says that the municipal land transfer tax is a volatile source of revenue – and the city shouldn’t count on it indefinitely. (CBC)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Norwegian path<\/strong><\/p>\n

The oil-rich Scandinavian country has invested its energy\u00a0revenues in a sovereign wealth fund since 1996, which\u00a0now\u00a0tops more than $1.158 trillion. Typically, the government can draw up to four per cent from that fund each year, slightly more than its annual 3.7 per cent rate of return, according to\u00a0Norges\u00a0Bank Investment Management.<\/p>\n

And when the economy dipped last year, the country weathered it easily, taking\u00a0its first-ever capital transfer from what Clayton dubbed its “rainy day fund”.<\/p>\n

“So now that oil prices have gone down, Norway’s got assets and it’s producing income,” the\u00a0Ryerson\u00a0University professor said. “So the message to Toronto is, ‘Don’t spend it all.'”<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Toronto’s land transfer tax revenue is booming, but the cupboard’s still bare ‘The message to Toronto is, ‘Don’t spend it all,’ economist says Toronto’s red-hot real estate market has sent municipal land transfer tax revenues soaring. But the city’s spending all that money, not saving it. (Sean Kilpatrick\/Canadian Press) In times of plenty, it can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3000,14311,12127,1241,14310,803],"class_list":["post-21713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-cbc-news","tag-land-transfer-tax","tag-laura-fraser","tag-norway","tag-real-estate-market","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21714,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713\/revisions\/21714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}