Transportation Infrastructure: Ontario Home Builders Association

Ontario Home Builders Association: The provincial agency has recommended a one per cent sales tax, a five-cent-a-litre gas tax, parking levies, and a 15 per cent increase in development charges to raise $2 billion annually for transportation infrastructure over the next 25 years, according to The Star. But the Ontario Home Builders Association, the Building Industry and Land Development Association and the Hamilton-Halton Home Builders Association say the scheme makes transit-oriented communities less affordable by imposing additional charges, levies and taxes on new home buyers and new businesses and Metrolinxs $50-billion Big Move public-transit expansion will unfairly add thousands of dollars to the price of a new home, property developers warn. It would boost rapid transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area GTHA from the current 500 kilometres of lines to 1,700 kilometres, and improve access so that 75 per cent of residents would be within two kilometres of a stop. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.