TORONTO’S FISCAL OUTLOOK: 2011 THROUGH 2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The City’s March 2010 fiscal plan noted that operating costs have been higher and faster‐growing than dependable revenues. Undependable revenues have so far covered the shortfall, but the plan indicated a need to replace these revenues with more sustainable revenue sources. Increased sustainable funding from the provincial government is the fiscal plan’s preferred solution. Should that funding fail to materialize, the plan indicates a need for double‐digit property tax increases over the next few years. This paper discusses the possibility of new sustainable funding from the provincial government. In view of the government’s fiscal outlook, it seems unlikely that the funding required by the City will materialize. It also seems unlikely that City Council will approve the fiscal plan’s fallback solution: double‐digit property tax increases. Cost reductions will be the likely means of correcting the operating budget shortfall. The cost reductions proposed by Mayor‐elect Ford are more than sufficient to correct the operating budget shortfall. Debt reduction and reserve build‐up – as proposed in his platform – would also be possible if the proposed reductions are implemented. Some cost reduction measures in the Mayor‐elect’s platform appear consistent with keeping service levels intact. However, in dollar terms these measures are a relatively small part of the total costreduction package. Negative impacts on services cannot be ruled out when larger cost‐reduction proposals are considered. Rather than attempting to maintain all current services with substantially reduced resource levels, Council may decide to eliminate some services entirely. Increased taxpayer dissatisfaction, if it materializes over the next four years, could prompt consideration of governance changes. The paper discusses the possibility of decentralizing parts of the City’s administration to the community council level. At the same time, budget decision‐making for some services could devolve to community councils. The purpose of these changes would be to accommodate variation in service preferences among communities. An increased number of community councils could be an improvement from this standpoint. Scenarios are discussed in which the number of community councils is increased (for example to 22). Loss of scale economies would not be expected with decentralization along these lines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.127 | 0.061 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".