No Money Back For Residents Following City Workers Strike
Posted September 24, 2009 6:52 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Call it the no-money-back guarantee.
Toronto residents won’t be seeing a rebate for the services lost during this summer’s strike.
Civic workers were off the job for 39 days, bringing a halt to garbage collection, day cares and public pools.
Some of us were hopeful that we’d be reimbursed for those losses – after all, they were paid for with our taxes.
But that’s not the case.
The city’s budget chief said the money saved during the strike will go toward keeping property taxes down for 2010.
We won’t know exactly how much money remained in city coffers until October 2.
That’s a big change from 2002, when a similar – but much shorter – strike saw the city spending $3.3 million. That protest lasted just 16 days before the province legislated civic employees back to work.
