Toronto St-Paul city councillor and candidate for mayor Josh Matlow has proposed that the city spend $200 million per year on a climate change plan that he proposes to be funded by a parking lot tax.
Matlow’s $200 million dollar spending plan would help the city tackle the “climate crisis” by constructing eco-friendly commercial buildings and residents, retrofitting existing buildings, expanding TTC service and bike lanes, and converting the city’s vehicle fleet to electric vehicles.
Matlow says that he would raise the revenue for his climate spending program by implementing a parking lot tax which would tax property owners for having car parking spaces for their customers.
“Rather than letting this deeply important, action-oriented strategy sit on the shelf, I will invest $200-million to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions caused by how we build, move and consume so that we can move forward towards achieving our promised goals,” says Matlow.
The City of Toronto has flirted with the idea of enacting a parking lot tax for its 2023 operating budget, as the city’s chief financial officer examined how such a tax would be implemented and how much revenue it would bring in for the city.
The city of Toronto’s report on the potential implementation of a parking lot tax says that the tax would help to “shift consumer habits to use public transport due to increased parking fees.”
Matlow’s platform states that the parking lot tax would be used to target shopping malls and downtown parking lots whose lots absorb lots of heat. The tax would also discourage “unnecessary trips made by car.”
A key tenet of Matlow’s plan is to expand the TTC’s service and lower the TTC’s fares in an effort to incentivize more Torontonians to use the transit. The plan also seeks to create a city-wide network of bike lanes to incentive cycling on city roads in lieu of driving.
