Thank you, Chair.
My sense, having just read this, is that Ms. Chow's various ideas are implicit in the opening statement, where she says, “Canada's urban infrastructure is crumbling, and overburdened municipalities are struggling to fund maintenance and expansions”. When I look at the various points, they all appear to me to be spending mechanisms, and for the most part, additional spending mechanisms. The one that particularly caught my attention, because I agree with Mr. Coderre on his point that Canadians pay enough taxes now as it is, is number 4, the penny tax.
In my experience, a tax is a tax is a tax. When I look at that, I see that it's levied by the municipality. I'd just like to ask a question to Ms. Chow, through you, Chair, just to help clarify so that I can understand.
I remember when our Mayor Gosnell had a sewer tax. It was called the GST, the Gosnell sewer tax. I don't think our current mayor, Mayor Fontana, would want this to be called the Fontana tax or the Fontana penny tax or something. He wouldn't want anything such as that.
It's a 1% municipally levied value-added sales tax. I can't imagine the infrastructure you would need to put in place to actually collect that. Would it be like a municipal GST or HST? I'm not sure how much we would drive the underground economy even that much more underground.
It's a sincere question, Ms. Chow, through you, Chair. How does my city of London collect that tax you're proposing?