Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Who will foot the bill for $28.5B transit plan? April 11, 2019.

Corporations have tunnel vision, only seeing responsibility in terms of one-way profits. All other costs are not on their radar screens. They fail to understand their broader social  and financial responsibility. Public expenses should be born by those who directly benefit from the services and use them. In the case of public transit and a lot of other public infrastructure that means the private sector should be paying a significant amount of the cost because they are the direct beneficiaries of the service that brings workers to their front doors. The same should go for highways, railroads, airlines and even private vehicles. Without all these publicly borne costs, employers would be bankrupt. Since the post-war years when infrastructure was built with high corporate taxes not a penny has been invested by the private sector. Governments have been riding that investment for seventy years. Now that this infrastructure is beginning to fall apart the chickens have come home to roost.

The bill for the newly minted transit plan should be a true P3 partnership with the corporate sector paying for half to costfrom their profits with no strings attached and the Federal, Provincial and Municipal governments splitting the other half. This corporate ‘tax levy’ would be a forward-thinking mechanism employed as the government sees fit to reduce provincial debt and costs for the public and workers since it is clear that cutting corporate taxes does not work and never has. Surely the banks, food conglomerates, oil and gas companies, liquor distilleries, entertainment industry, developers and other major corporate behemoths could easily come up with a measly $14.25B in chump change out of their massive and deep pockets. The economy would skyrocket with a building boom that the corporate entities would directly benefit from ten-fold. It’s a win-win scenario.

This would rebalance the badly skewed scales of economic justice that have been so dramatically out of proportion over the last thirty years since Ronald Regan introduced ‘trickle-down’ economics by giving back to the society that has carried them for so many decades. This is a real investment in their own future viability and growth and would encourage them to stay in one place after having made such an investment. If we required all big corporations to invest in their local infrastructure and economy instead of investing in toxic waste and rusty factories there would be much less mobility amongst companies in the marketplace and the local economies would be stabilized and flourish, knowing that the private and public sector are working together to build a better society.

Governments and corporations need to take off the tunnel-vision blinders they are wearing and see the economic light of day.