Toronto Business Times

Case in point this week: the city's economic development committee's unholstering of Toronto's new tax increment equivalent grant program - designed to encourage high-end industrial development - to enable a large hospitality and retail development surrounding the Woodbine Racetrack.

The WoodbineLive! development will bring a lot of jobs to the disadvantaged communities in North Etobicoke - more than 9,000 according to the U.S.-based Cordish Company that's proposing the development. And according to the racetrack, a partner in the plan, it will also preserve jobs for the 2,500 currently employed at Woodbine. That's not insignificant for a part of the city that has lost 7,500 jobs in the past five years and includes some of the most troubled and under-serviced neighbourhoods in the entire city.

With a design and function reminiscent of Las Vegas, it will serve as a tourism draw to Toronto, located as it is near Pearson airport and touching on the 905 region. That Vegas similarity means venues, which will also in a certain light, boost Toronto's cultural cache. It all adds up to what the economic development department calls a "transformative" project and that, apparently, merits extra tender loving care.

And so the economic development committee approved an incentive package that is literally the richest to be given to a developer in the city's history. WoodbineLive!'s property taxes will be phased in over 20 years, a period twice as long as the city's tax increment equivalent grant policy normally dictates. It turns a blind eye to the requirement that the new development actually generates well-paying, high-end employment. And $120 million in tax savings.

It's true that the $120 million is money the city wouldn't see otherwise but one must ask the question: if a massive entertainment complex centred around legalized gambling can't make enough of a buck to generate a healthy profit and pay its property tax in these times, what business can?

Toronto Council and planners are still holding out hope for the film industry in the somewhat more trendy Leslieville, meanwhile. There, Toronto is taking a different approach to minimum-wage retail in its battle with SmartCentres over a 650,000-square-foot retail complex on Eastern Avenue.

The city is engaged in an epic battle at the Ontario Municipal Board to prevent a shovel from going into the ground on the land currently occupied by the Toronto Film Studios.

The linchpin of the city's case is the notion that Toronto needs to preserve its industrial lands for those higher-paying film-industry jobs or at the very least other similar employment that will let its workers live well in this city, and a level of productivity that will contribute to both the local economy and the city's property tax base.

The argument is a righteous one, even though the state of the film industry in this town makes it unlikely the lands on Eastern will find an immediate high-end use. When you turn industrial lands over to retail or residential use, they're lost as industrial lands forever.

Now, nobody's turning over industrial lands that are proven to be in any way viable up in north Etobicoke, so the situations in southeast Toronto and northwest Toronto are not perfectly analogous. But for a few degrees of separation, it's amazing how widely divergent are the city's responses to the two situations: in one, fight tooth and claw to make sure a money-making development doesn't occur. In the other, forgo $120 million in property tax revenue to help the private sector finance a development that has just as much - if not more - money-making potential.

That old adage that what matters is location, location and location was never more true.