David Miller

And as long as they're buying and selling in the city, sort of in the same market, they're not going to pay when they're when they're purchasing a subcontractor.

young people understand that this tax was first implemented in 2007 by David Miller, our last NDP mayor prior to Olivia Chow.

It was a blatant tax grab, no reason for it, no justification for it.

And by the way, the Ontario land transfer tax, it only came into being in 1975, which was kind of a long time ago, but it's also not a tax that's been on the books since know 1870 or what have you like this is something that uh was a choice a policy choice back then to duplicate it to add a second one in toronto was a policy choice and we often tax things that we want to disincentivize we we create syntaxes on things I didn't realize that a family living in a home is some sort of sin that we want to penalize.

It is, again, we didn't close the border.

Canadians maybe just decided to go to the U.S. less.

Why couldn't we have done that with American booze? What wasn't trustworthy? Or it just made a splash for the Doug Fords and the David Eby's.

who called, again, like raced us to an election so they could fight for Ontario or fight for B.C. against Donald Trump.

in the liberal leadership race, a debate that took place last evening.

While we were talking about that, I got in my inbox an announcement from one of the mayoral candidates this morning that I think is really spectacular.

Let me say that up front.

Brad Bradford says he will eliminate the municipal land transfer tax on primary residences on the value of the sale up to the average price of a Toronto home.

That's what the Bradford campaign thinks.

That is not what the lesson is of the David Miller campaign, the Rob Ford campaign, lots of campaigns in the city where there was volatility in the last two weeks sometimes.

I mean, Anna Bailao almost beat Olivia Chow.

She would have beaten her if there'd been a few more days of campaigning.

But giving that answer, I think, is an example in my mind of like the way these things can tie in together.

People in this city, some people, some older people, remember when David Miller was running for mayor, there was a sense of the movement that developed around him, the vision guy.

But he was really talking about like, cancel the bridge to the island airport, sweep the streets, right? Like a lobbyist registry.

Small things, but they tied into a big picture that he was, you had a sense of where he was taking them.

And I remember, I'll talk quickly about two of the successful mayors in Toronto's history.

One was David Miller, because he launched his campaign on a clean and beautiful city at a time when, and also he had the broom and he was going to sweep away not just the dirt, but also the corruption at City Hall.

And that was for, that captured people's imaginations across various neighborhoods, various political stripes, because there was a resonating of that sense that City Hall wasn't operating as it should.

And so when he put forward that vision, it resonated with people.

Absolutely.

I like what Karen said there that each politician has to sort of make you dream, right? And it doesn't have to be big, right? We had a mayor going back a while back, going back a while back, a while back, who before he got involved in politics, he was the head of the botanical gardens here.

And, you know, he made people dream that I'm going to put you know trees and and plants and so and he actually did that i don't think he was a great mayor i don't think he was a bad mayor either but i i remember my mother-in-law telling me oh look at this on my street all of a sudden you know instead of planting these within they so he made you know sometimes it's just a simple thing that you know whether it be david miller you know that I'm going to just clean the streets up.

Sometimes you just need a simple message.

God forbid Olivia Chow gets elected, your taxes are going up at an unprecedented rate.

She makes David Miller look like a fiscal conservative, and companies will start fleeing.

I want the best mayor.

I don't want someone going in there raising taxes in an unprecedented hike, and, uh, create economic development, create housing.