CFIB Reveals Cities are Constantly Falsifying Revenue Figures

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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While the country’s big city mayors are all set to convene in Ottawa this week, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) has revealed some eye-opening findings of a study that shows municipal governments are constantly falsifying the figures representing how much tax money they end up receiving.

It was highlighted that the claims made by Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) that the cities only acquire eight cents per tax dollar collected in Canada is completely false and uncovered that the actual figure is almost double that. It was pointed out that FCM routinely avoids major sources of revenue from its calculations, like transfers from provincial and federal governments. CFIB Executive Vice-President, Laura Jones, mentioned that “this eight cent myth is used at every municipal meeting to support the story that municipalities are revenue starved.” He added “but it’s a story that doesn’t reflect reality.”

The report highlighted that although transfer payments from senior levels of government lessened in the 1990s, generally municipal revenue has increased thereafter as municipal taxes and fees more than made up the difference. The report determined that transfers from senior levels of government are at their peak levels at the time and the inflation-adjusted revenues for Canadian municipalities have doubled in the 31 years leading up to 2012. Jones stated that the “municipalities do not have a revenue problem,” explaining that “they have a spending problem. It’s one thing to ask for more money if it’s needed and another to spend like it’s going out of style, and then cry poor.”