The City of Toronto’s latest demand for $250 million a year from provincial taxpayers should be filed in the finest blue box in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s office and recycled into a more useful and credible product.

Because until Toronto regains control of its City Hall’s financial three-ring circus and the clowns in it, that municipality should not get a cent more from the provincial treasury, or more accurately the provincial taxpayers. Given the mind-numbingly chaotic condition of the latest Toronto budget, it would make as much sense to simply dump the $250 million a year into Lake Ontario and watch it sink out of sight to the sludgy bottom.

Toronto Mayor David Miller says — apparently with a straight face — that he needs the annual quarter of a billion dollar infusion from provincial coffers to run public transit and deal with Toronto’s structural deficit. To which we can only answer: What structural deficit?

Two days ago, Miller held a news conference to make the astonishing announcement that he had discovered $100 million that he didn’t even know the city had. This windfall means that Toronto finishes the latest fiscal year with a robust $350 million surplus. So where’s the structural deficit?

Miller crowed that his discovery meant the four per cent residential property tax hike for this year would be cut back to 2.9 per cent and the commercial increase pared down to under one per cent. Meanwhile, proposed service cuts and fee hikes would be reviewed — perhaps to be reversed.

While such news will be welcomed by Toronto taxpayers, it does make their city’s budgetary process seem more like a work of science fiction than sound financial action. How does Miller stumble through months of budget talks and months of seemingly hard decisions only to uncover at the 11th hour a $100-million discrepancy in the size of the city’s surplus that turns everything upside down?

Damaging his credibility even more is Miller’s continual boast that Torontonians consistently pay lower taxes than their neighbours in Mississauga, Oshawa or, indeed, in any community in the Greater Toronto Area.

Ontarians have a right to two answers from Miller: How can he cry poor when he has $350 million in the city coffers? And what right does he have to put his hands in the pockets of taxpayers in other Ontario communities? They might well be paying higher taxes than their counterparts in Toronto, they have no say over how Toronto spends its money and they can hear Mayor Miller’s critics complain that he is mismanaging the Toronto’s finances.

Make no mistake. We accept the fact that Ontario taxpayers fund projects and services in every Ontario municipality. In this respect, Toronto is no different from Waterloo Region and its cities and townships which benefit from provincial dollars. We do not question Toronto’s right to its fair share of provincial support either.

But asking for $250 million a year more from the province now — when the city is flush with funds, when its citizens pay low taxes and when City Hall doesn’t know from one moment to the next how much money it really has — is going too far.

The signals coming out of Queen’s Park suggest that Premier McGuinty and his government are not impressed by Mayor Miller’s financial aptitude and are disinclined to meet his request for $250 million more a year.

This is music to our ears. The premier should hang tough on this one. The Ontario public should back him all the way. There should be a comprehensive audit of Toronto’s finances, the results of which should be made public. Someone — and maybe this will have to wait until after October’s municipal election — should clean up the mess in Toronto City Hall. And then, only then, should a single syllable be murmured about more provincial cash for Toronto.