Yes, you’re reading this right: Comstock praises the NDP

By Mike Comstock –

All Toronto media completely missed a big story of the Dec. 12 provincial legislature’s meeting.

The most amazing thing that morning was the opposition gallery and many other seats packed with 60-70 members of neighbourhood business organizations (BIAs) from across Toronto. They were viewing Ontario Parliament that day in support of an opposition NDP’s question to Minister of Finance Greg Sobora.

The NDP‘s Critic for Small Business, newly elected MPP Cheri Di Novo (Parkdale – High Park), introduced a resolution calling on the government to provide relief for small business in Toronto from the Business Education Tax. This tax is imposed by the provincial government, although it appears on store keepers’ municipal tax bills, and constitutes 50% of your annual property tax.

The Toronto Association of BIAs (TABIA) says, “It is a discriminatory tax because the rate imposed on Toronto business property is much higher than that imposed on all other municipalities in Ontario. The result is the extraction of approximately $120 million of revenue from Toronto business for use elsewhere. For a small Toronto retailer, the differential can easily run into thousands of dollars every year.”

Some BIA members would even support not lowering Toronto’s tax, but to make it equal across Ontario. That would produce millions of dollars for education and create a level playing field.

In order to encourage the NDP on this course, and to impress upon the many Liberal party members elected to the Legislature in Toronto ridings, representatives of most every one of the 60 BIAs in Toronto, showed up in the viewing galleries. A TABIA member said, “This is the first time that any political party has taken up this cause for which we have been fighting for so long.”

Politics make strange bedfellows! That should have merited some press, but alas, only in your local paper.