Taxes comprise about one-third of a home’s price in and around Toronto and Hamilton. It's a mark of flagrantly poor governance

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About one-third of a home’s price in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is a confection of taxes, some of which are passed down from developer to consumer.

And amid a years-long, and unprecedented, housing crisis in Canada’s largest city, such a debilitating tax regime speaks of flagrantly poor, if not contemptuous, governance.

Market fundamentals, like population growth — one of many — largely determine a home’s valuation, inviting the question: if not for tax greed, how much would that million-dollar home actually cost? (And, by extension, how many hundreds of dollars could be saved on rent every month?)

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The Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA) revealed taxes comprised 31 per cent of a Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area home’s sticker price in 2021. But Paul Smetanin, CANCEA’s president, who estimates levies have grown to at least 33 per cent today, says they’ll keep escalating should nothing change.

“Since our report, and given that they’re up to 2021, it’s definitely due for an update because it’s higher than 31 per cent now,” Smetanin told the Post in a September interview.

To put that into context, on the purchase of a million-dollar home three years ago, buyers essentially paid $310,000 in taxes.

Smetanin says the taxes — comprising development charges, community benefit charges, a new parkland dedication levy, the land transfer tax, HST and more — “are a symptom of a broken fiscal system” in which the feds’ share of tax revenue leaves........

© National Post