On the question about resources, this area is the fastest-growing municipal expenditure. It's ahead of any other areas. It's currently 17% of our budget, but it's growing exponentially because there are so many new dimensions to this problem.
Safety includes the terrorism threat. You'll remember there were a number of arrests in Brampton in June; these were heavily managed by the local police forces, so there's something....
I'm sure you weren't thinking about terrorism when you were a police officer, but now this is a big part of the policing responsibility. Where should the money come from on that file? When Toronto deployed 1,000 people to contain a potential threat to North America in the SARS crisis, should the people who pay property tax in Toronto have borne that burden, or should it have rested somewhere else?
I don't have the answers to these questions, but I do know that municipal budgets are stretched to the extreme. It's very difficult to increase property taxes; you're just defeated. That's what happens. The candidate who promises not to increase taxes wins the election.
Taxes that grow with the economy are so much more powerful as a revenue source, but we don't have access to those as a municipal government, so if municipal police forces are to focus on terrorism, if municipal public health authorities are to deal with SARS, if the cities are to have the capacity to react to a toxic spill, it costs money--and frankly, they're not going to be able to pay for it very well. It's just a reality. I know there's only one taxpayer, but let me tell you--GST and income tax grow a lot faster than property tax, and that's our problem.