It all makes sense now.

[sylvia_rachel]

Toronto, much as I love the place, often doesn't seem to work very well. Now I think I've figured out why.

The newsletter we got in the mail today, issued by the municipal government, contains a very pretty bar graph showing how much money, out of the 2336,86$ in annual property taxes paid on an "average" home assessed at 387 000$, is spent on

Comments

[anonymous]

Down here in the US property taxes are used to fund local schools, which is one of the reasons they have fantastic schools in wealthy towns and suburbs, and scary, falling-apart ones in the inner city.

So... it could be worse!

(Although, for the record, property taxes in TO seem kinda high to me.)

to

[sylvia_rachel]

Well, I have no basis for comparison, since I've never personally paid property taxes anywhere else ;). Ours are not as high as the example, of course, because our place is not assessed at anywhere near $387K.

Our property taxes are supposed to fund schools, too, I thought. At least, one of the things you have to tick off on some form or other is whether you want your taxes to support English public, French public, English Catholic, or French Catholic school boards. (In Ontario, Catholic school boards really are Catholic; it's the only province where both public and Catholic schools are fully funded, and therefore free, while schools affiliated with any other religion, no matter how well they meet provincial curriculum requirements, get no funding at all.) Or maybe that's provincial income taxes? Could be.

Anyway, yes, could be worse.

Of course this isn't the whole picture, because you don't see what other levels of government are funding these things and for how much. So my immediate reaction was perhaps unfair...