If Toronto can come in at 6.9 per cent, no Niagara municipality should be approving a 2025 budget hike above that.
Toronto is a municipal mess. That city is coming apart at the seams faster than a $10 Temu hoodie. Every time I visit friends in Toronto, I look at the crumbling Gardener, the busted sidewalks, the garbage strewn parks, and I think to myself that this is a city really teetering on the edge of complete collapse.
Last time me and the wife went there for an overnight stay to watch a hockey game, we exited the arena and saw literal rats running around all over the place. Rome right before the fall, I swear.
And yet, even with its cornucopia of problems, Toronto is able to get by with a 6.9 per cent tax hike this year. Which will make a mockery of every Niagara municipality that comes in higher.
Niagara Falls is already staring down a 7.6 per cent hike. Niagara-on-the-Lake is facing a mammoth 14.4 per cent hike. Fort Erie hasn’t managed to put together a number yet, which is a pretty good sign that it will come in high.
For the municipalities that have already come in at a reasonable number (Pelham at 4.8 per cent, Welland at 3.9 per cent) for their 2025 budget: well done.
For those still flailing around at the 7 per cent range, I have some answers to your problems. Setting aside the major driver of tax increases—inflated staff salaries—there are two super easy items on every municipal budget that can be wiped off the books to shave a couple points off the budget.
First things first, get rid of your integrity commissioner. They are a scam.
Across Niagara, millions of dollars have been dumped down the integrity commissioner drain and the taxpayer gets nothing in exchange for all that money. There is no appreciable benefit.
When a city spends $100,000 on road repaving, the benefit is very clear. It’s a thing I can point to and say, look at that, my tax dollars paved this road and now I can drive down it without blowing a tire on a pothole.
Taxpayers like that sort of thing. There’s an immediacy and a tangibility that makes us happy.
Compare that with spending $100,000 on an integrity commission “investigation” that results in little more than 150 pages of useless drivel copy, much of it pasted from the town’s code of conduct document. Waste of money, every single time. No exceptions.
Councillors are grown adults and they should be able to settle their differences without hiring some old guy to charge $300 an hour to write a report about how you should all be nicer to each other.
Councillors are grown adults and they should be able to settle their differences without hiring some old guy
Most of Niagara’s municipalities (and a bunch more across Ontario) use the same integrity commission company, ADR Chambers Inc., which laughed all the way to the bank last year with an eye-watering $17 million in revenue. Imagine if all that cash was put back into filling potholes and fixing leaky pipes.
But integrity commissioners aren’t the only municipal budget scam out there. The second is one that I’ve harped on many times but I’ll do it again because I stumbled across another egregious example last week: pointless consulting contracts and lame market studies.
Grimsby recently approved spending $60,000 on a “tourism study.” The city plans to hire, you guessed it, an outside consulting firm which is going to, I dunno, tell them how to do tourism or something.
Those consultants gotta already be laughing as they open up Chat-GPT and ask it to whip up a few AI-generated bullet points on “how to increase tourism” before calling it a day. In fact, out of curiosity, I punched that into one of those AI-generator things, and you can see the results below. This took approximately 8 seconds to generate, and will be just as good as what Grimsby paid $60,000 to get back.
The following was generated by AI from the prompt, “Give me 10 bullet points on ways to increase tourism in Grimsby."
Here are ten bullet points on ways to increase tourism to Grimsby, Ontario:
Leverage Historical Attractions: Enhance and promote the historical significance of sites like Nelles Manor and the Grimsby Museum, offering more interactive exhibits and guided tours that delve into the town's rich history.
Promote Outdoor Activities: Capitalize on the natural beauty of the Niagara Escarpment by improving trails like those in Beamer Memorial Conservation Area and promoting hiking, bird watching, and other outdoor activities, especially during the annual hawk migration.
Cultural Events and Festivals: Organize and market more cultural events, such as the Grimsby Farmers' Market, art festivals, or a revitalized version of the historic Grimsby Chautauqua, to attract cultural tourists.
Develop a Wine and Culinary Scene: Establish Grimsby as a gateway to the Niagara wine region by collaborating with local wineries and restaurants to create specialized food and wine tours, tasting events, and seasonal agri-tourism experiences.
Enhance Downtown Appeal: Revitalize downtown Grimsby with boutique shopping, unique dining experiences, and public art installations to draw in tourists looking for small-town charm with modern amenities.
Improve Accessibility: Advocate for the completion of the GO Transit train station to make Grimsby more accessible for day-trippers from Toronto and other parts of the Greater Toronto Area.
Marketing and Branding: Develop a strong tourism brand for Grimsby that emphasizes its unique position between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment, using digital marketing strategies to reach broader audiences through social media, travel blogs, and targeted ads.
Waterfront Development: Invest in and promote the waterfront areas like Grimsby Beach and Grimsby On The Lake, enhancing beach facilities, creating water sports opportunities, and hosting beachfront events.
Tourism Packages: Create and market bundled tourism packages that include accommodations, local tours, and dining experiences, possibly in collaboration with regional tourism bodies to tap into the millions visiting the Niagara Gateway Information Centre.
Community Engagement: Encourage local businesses and residents to participate in tourism initiatives by offering incentives for maintaining historical aesthetics or hosting tourists, thereby fostering a community-wide tourism-friendly environment.
These strategies could help position Grimsby as an appealing destination for tourists looking for a blend of history, nature, and cultural experiences.
From now on, whenever a Niagara council gets that ill-advised itch to hire a consultant for a study, or wants to send something to an integrity commission for advice, try punching the request into one of those AI doodads instead. They’re getting pretty good.
They’re actually so good it has me worried. We’re probably only a few years away from AI having the capability to generate mildly amusing, smug columns about local news items. Then what the heck am I gonna do with myself.
James Culic is definitely a real person and not an experimental AI program designed to provoke readers into sending letters to the editor for free content. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or use AI to generate your own letter to the editor and send it here.
