The Villager

Case in point: the minor media frenzy that occurred when it came out that next week, Toronto's Executive Committee was going to consider studying a municipal tax on bottled water.

The idea for the tax first came up during Round Two of the great land transfer tax debate, when Ward 13 (Parkdale High Park) Councillor Bill Saundercook tried to get council to endorse a study of the money-raising strategy but failed to even get a vote on the motion. It appeared again this week, in the agenda for the Executive Committee which Mayor David Miller chairs, in a two-part motion that also included a look at road tolls.

Miller wrote a letter endorsing taking a look at the bottled water tax, but not the road tolls.

Which is not to say that the mayor endorsed a bottled water tax; Miller was pretty clearly asking for a review and only a review, to determine whether the city even had the legal ability to impose such a tax under the City of Toronto Act.

In fact, the city likely doesn't have that ability. The City of Toronto Act only permits sales taxes on items such as alcohol, tobacco and a few other items like entertainment and hotels, but that's it. And even if the Act were amended to allow for a bottled water tax, it's unlikely that it would yield much in the way of revenue because of the administrative costs associated with collecting it.

But in these post land-transfer-tax days, it's perhaps too much to expect too many of us to let a little impossibility get in the way of a good panic. We've become accustomed to panic over the land-transfer tax battle, on both sides of the debate - faced variously with the prospect of darkened community centres and libraries, and the collapse of Toronto's residential real estate market.

The immediate aftermath seems to have yielded something less on both sides, as community centres and libraries reopened to small fanfare and the housing market already shows signs of adjustment (the Toronto Dominion Bank this week put out a mortgage package that absorbs the cost of the land transfer tax when it comes into effect). By all evidence, life is going on with the land transfer tax looming.

And yet - still we flinch.

It would behoove all of us to take a moment, then, and regain some perspective. Sometimes, at City Hall, talk is just talk; particularly when individual councillors get ideas into their heads and try to make some hay out of them. Some of those ideas go somewhere - most of them do not.

And while taxing bottled water might appeal to a few more councillors than just Saundercook - Ward 38 (Scarborough Centre) Councillor and Works and Infrastructure Committee Chair Glenn De Baeremaeker does have a well-aged bottle of water that he likes to wave around disparagingly as he promotes the city's own crystal-clean tapwater - the simple fact of it is, it's not going to work.

If we want to worry more about taxes, it makes more sense to pay attention to the equally looming operating budget next year, and the property tax increase it may require. Given the city's otherwise shaky financial situation, there's reason to flinch.