'A bad mistake': City of Toronto staff knew vacant home tax bills could backfire, emails show
CTV
Toronto city staff signed off on the mass mailing of 176,000 incorrect vacant home tax bills despite discussion that sending them out would likely yield just as many appeals, according to internal emails obtained by CTV News Toronto.
Toronto city staff signed off on the mass mailing of 176,000 incorrect vacant home tax bills despite discussion that sending them out would likely yield just as many appeals, according to internal emails obtained by CTV News Toronto.
“It's a story of disorganization, dysfunction, and disconnect from political reality,” political analyst Scott Reid said Tuesday.
“Who did what, who failed to do what, and why were Torontonians stuck with this gigantic canard?”
In early April, tens of thousands of Torontonians received money-owing notices in the mail, reporting that they were on the hook for thousands of dollars because their property had been deemed vacant by the city. The vacant home tax is designed to discourage speculators from letting homes sit empty during a housing crisis, but as many as 20 per cent of property owners did not know they needed to manually make the occupancy declaration every year.
“This year's rollout of the vacant home tax was really badly done,” Toronto Coun. Dianne Saxe acknowledged Tuesday. “And caused a whole batch of unnecessary anguish to lots of people.”
That anguish was preventable, internal documents suggest.
On March 15, the employee amassing the vacancy data wrote in an email to four others, “hi guys, we may expect more than 150K undeclared accounts this year, and it would take hours to run the VHT bill.”
