We have no quarrel with Quebec's jurisdiction over transit, but we don't submit that it's unique. We think that provinces have jurisdiction over transit. Perhaps if Parliament stopped collecting a heinous excise tax on gasoline, the provinces could go and tax it, fund away, and do what they like.
We were recently asked to comment on proposed tolls to finance the replacement of the Champlain Bridge in Montreal, in a radio interview, and the interviewer was shocked to hear that we enthusiastically support them. I had to point out that we're the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, not the Montreal bridge motorists federation, and we believe that those who use a service should pay for it.
So we put it to you that the FCM, collectively, have been proven to be bad managers of taxpayer dollars, and they should not be rewarded with more federal money for more municipal empire-building. We put it to you that voter turnouts in municipal elections are woefully low, way short of 90%, and that the municipal politicians are principally beholden to people on city payrolls who extract outsized pay packages, benefits, and pensions in exchange for their support, and also to people who buy land as far as possible from transit, schools, municipal infrastructure, and other amenities, and then proceed to build housing on it.
Here in Ottawa, you just need to look at last weekend's daily papers to see ads for new housing located nowhere near any transit.
City governments cheerfully approve these projects, extract massive development cost charges for parks, street lights, sidewalks, street trees, and then send their lobbyists to you to demand billions for elaborate transit systems to get all these newcomers to their distant jobs. The cities’ approach seems to be to fill pastures with two-car garages, and then demand federal assistance for ever wider roads and ever more elaborate transit systems to prevent their regional economies from collapsing into gridlock.