Gas Tax Should Fund the TTC

Far from lowering the gas tax, the province should raise it - by about 10 cents per litre.

If they phase it in over the course of a year, it will be completely invisible, what with the constant movement in price.

10 cents per litre, with the money going to fund public transit across the province would revolutionise the system. The Sheppard subway could be completed, from STC to York. The Don Valley LRT could be built; as could a harbourfront line.

Couldn't the same thing be accomplished by adding an additional tax to transit fares?

c-mac, taxing transit riders is taxing a thing that is needed more than gas. We need to tax bad things (pollution, gas, waste, etc.) and not tax good things like mass transit.

If transit isn't afforadble than people won't use it - and that is bad.

I am not sure what the gas tax is used for in Canada, but in the States, it is used to support the road infrastructure. If we do away with the gas tax as many are requesting, the funds for maintaining our roads will have to come from somewhere else.

I do like the idea though of a tax on fuel that is used to support alternative fuel sources. Great idea.

I also like the idea of a general acceleration of research into the area. This article covers the States, but the idea could work elsewhere: http://www.technologybizdev.com/2005/09/05/fuel-efficiency-technology-not-pulling-its-weight/

If we tax all the bad things in order to fund the good things, then we would need the bad things to keep happening. So how does that help? These ideas have come up time and time again and when you work throught the logic it makes no sense.

I'm very disappointed in the NDP in suggesting it be cut - like any other party would... the tax is PER LITRE, not a % (except for the gst part) and is a set 24.7 cents per litre, which goes towards road construction and maintenance, and now a little bit for transit. So, for gas that's 80 cents - 25 cents is tax and 55 is oil company revenue - for 1.20 gas, 25 cents is tax, and 95 cents is oil company revenue.

Michael, the whole point of taxing the bad is so we can get rid of it. If we don't have anymore bad things being used/produced, then less tax money will be needed to undo the bad.

And besides, what would stop us from changing the tax system again when there is no more money to be made from the bad side of things?

There was a very good article on this very topic in today's (Sept 6) Toronto Star regarding tax shifting. It was in the GTA section I believe, a very well written article. It talks about what the goals of the future government of Ontario should have for our public transit system be doing with our public transit system with regard to tax shifting.

Adam, I would like to know when in history taxing something to death has ever worked. These are not new and progressive ideas.

These aren't new ideas, but for our generation they are. We have been raised in a world where we are told the tax is bad and it hurts the individual, but since 1980 Canada has not seen improvements in this area.

In that context than, maybe, taxing things that are drains on our society to death may actually be progressive.

The article that Dan speaks of is really good actually. Wish I read it before I wrote this post.....

C-mac:

That wouldn't work at all. The TTC moves less than 500 million riders a year. Even if it were at that level, and even if you taxed each rider an extra dollar per trip (and even if that didn't cause the end to people using public transit) that still wouldn't be enough to even moderately improve the system.

Taxing auto fuel, OTOH, accomplishes two nessecities. Firstly, it reduces the attractiveness of burning tonnes of fuel each day. Secondly, there is a LOT of auto fuel being used - a conservative estimate would be about a half billion litres per week (10 million cars at 50 litres per week each). Even adding only 10 cents to each litre of fuel would generate vast amounts of cash to help fund transit.