City-county separation was the original method of organizing municipalities in the province of Ontario. When an urban area of a county became classified as a city, it would be politically separated. The province has moved toward regional structures that link urban and rural since the 1950s, but...

Saint John, Charlottetown and Montreal have the highest tax burdens on new business amongst major Canadian cities, according to a new C.D. Howe Institute report. In “The 2014 C.D. Howe Institute Business Tax Burden Ranking,” authors Adam Found, Benjamin Dachis and Peter Tomlinson conduct...

Business property taxes are a major part of the tax burden on new business investment that can tip the balance in the competition for capital among Canadian cities and provinces, according to a report released today by the C.D. Howe Institute. In “What Gets Measured Gets Managed: The Economic...

When governments analyze tax policies aimed at attracting investment, they typically rely on a variable called the marginal effective tax rate (METR) on capital. The METR is a measure of the effective tax burden on new business investment. Recent Ontario budgets have presented estimates of the...

This paper analyzes economies of scale for two municipal services by considering how per-household municipal costs are affected by a municipality’s size. An econometric model is used to estimate costs associated with fire and police services using data for 445 municipalities in the Province of...