All the major parties in this provincial election campaign have offered up platforms salted with pocketbook promises, whether it’s the Tories and NDP pledging to take HST off your hydro bill, or the Liberals proposing to chip in on your post-secondary tuition.

It’s a direct appeal to voters as individuals worry about their own personal bottom lines in a rocky economy, but the cities Ontarians live in are also pinched.

Here in Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson sent a five-question survey to local candidates to suss out their support for what basically amounted to a shopping list: Holding tanks to keep sewage out of the Ottawa River ($50 million required from the province), light rail ($600 million), affordable housing ($25 million), more uploading of social service costs ($121 million) and table games at the Rideau Carleton Raceway, from which the city would get a cut of the action from the province.

Even as city hall chases Queen’s Park over these big-ticket items, the little stuff accumulates. A city report on the Neighbourhood Traffic Improvement Program lists 462 traffic-calming projects (speed humps, turning restrictions, narrowed intersections and the like) approved by councils going back to 1994, but never actually completed for lack of funding. Staff advise it would cost $7 million to clear the to-do list, but the program’s annual budget is only $700,000.

The city has also been aggressive in its search for new ways to scare up money, whether by plastering more public property with advertising or by taking advantage of the McGuinty government’s premium rate for green energy by adding solar panels to the roofs of city buildings.

The problem, as seen by municipal leaders like Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, is that cities increasingly can’t cover their growing expenses through property taxes, and what they need most from provincial governments isn’t project-by-project handouts, but a new deal on taxation powers and revenue sharing.    

“I’m the mayor of a city that has more people in it than five provinces,” he said last week in Toronto. “Yet I have the exact same legislative authority as any village of 30 or 40 people, and that has to change.”

It’s an ambitious proposal and, with Ontario facing a projected $16-billion deficit and making ends meet with equalization payments from the feds, likely a hard sell with whoever’s sitting in the premier’s office after Thursday’s vote.