The fall season has arrived. Students are back at school. The aroma of pumpkin spice permeates every coffee shop in existence. Usually sane people are talking about dressing up like Barbie or Ken for Halloween. And the threat of Christmas advertising hangs in the air.

Fall is also when city councils, legislatures, and even Parliament, get back to work. This year, there seems to be a renewed desire by locally elected officials to reset the municipal financial balance.

Perhaps this is being driven by Toronto's well-publicized financial crisis: its $46.5 billion dollar funding gap over the next ten years.

That is a staggering amount of money, particularly for an order of government that is prohibited from running deficits. This isn't Ottawa, when a few billion here and more billions there just get added to the national debt, and nobody gets very exorcized about it.

The city's finance department has given council a report that suggests a Toronto sales tax could raise $800 million annually.

While Toronto is the poster child for municipal financial crises, every municipality in Canada is suffering from under-funding. The stark reality is that property taxes cannot pay for the needs of our cities any longer. As long as Canadian cities are primarily funded by property taxes, towns and cities will remain in penury.

Cities need to shift to consumption taxes as a fairer system of financing themselves.

I've been riding the horse for years, as those of you who have read my books or heard my speeches over the past couple of decades know. When I wrote "Taking Back Our Cities" in 2011, I argued that 1% of the (then) GST/HST and 1% of local Income Tax would provide cities with the financial base to invest and move forward in the competitive global economy.

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin was gracious enough to spend a lot of time with me. He is, of course, still revered by knowledgeable municipal leaders as the finance minister who got the Gas Tax passed. That has directed billions to Canada's towns and cities.

Mr. Martin made the key point in the book that getting a piece of a provincial sales tax does not require any sort of constitutional change—it can be done by a provincial government. What it does take is courage and wisdom by a Premier.

If this discussion moves forward, and I hope it does in Ontario and across the country, then there are three cautionary notes for municipal leaders. The first is, if you get additional local taxation powers, then you are also going to be held accountable for that spending. That is fair.

The second warning I would offer is do not do collection of consumption tax dollars by creating a new, complex tax department. Surely the more efficient way is to have the provincial or the federal government continue to use their apparatus for collection; they have the infrastructure already in place. They would then remit to municipalities their share of revenue each month. Establishing a new, separate municipal bureaucracy to collect this tax seems to me to be a waste of resources.

 Just my opinion.

The third thing is that provinces must understand that giving such taxing powers only to certain large cities is unfair. It could also anger residents, some of whom would presumably start shopping 'out of town' to save the tax. It should be applied across a province so no municipality is penalized. That may mean a 1-2 cent increase in the provincial sales tax. Welcome to reality.

Getting access to a local sales tax, which is a common financing strategy for US cities, seems like a logical step. There is growing acceleration of this belief in city halls across Canada. Good. A coordinated and intensive movement towards this goal is surely a positive for local communities, but also for stronger and more resilient provincial economies.

We are in the 21^st century; we must realize that Canada cannot keep financing its municipalities using a 17^th century tax system.