The City’s Money, Good Government & Democracy

A plain-language explainer · 8th-grade reading level · every figure below is sourced and checkable.

What’s wrong here

Toronto’s 2026 operating budget is $18.9 billion. Before balancing it, the city faced an opening gap that grew from an early outlook of about $1.07 billion to an adjusted $1.34 billion once new pressures were counted.¹ Over the next ten years, the pressures add up to about $46.5 billion.² This is not one bad year. It is the shape of the system.

Here is why. The city’s main tax — property tax — does not grow with the economy the way sales and income taxes do. And the property values it is based on are frozen: Ontario paused reassessment, so your 2026 tax bill still rests on what homes were worth on January 1, 2016. That was supposed to be a four-year cycle. We are in year ten.³ The freeze does not change how much the city collects. It quietly changes who pays what.

The city asked the province for new money tools, like a share of the sales tax. In January 2026, the province said no. Only the province can say yes.⁴

Openness needs work too: Ontario’s Ombudsman reviewed closed-door council meetings across the province in 2023–24, and 42% of the reviews it completed found the open-meeting rules were broken.⁵

What’s been proven to work elsewhere

Paris lets residents propose and vote on about €100 million of city projects every year. Participation grew from 40,000 people to 158,000 in three years.⁶ In Brazil, cities that adopted this kind of citizen budgeting shifted money toward sanitation and health — and infant deaths fell 5–10% compared with similar cities.⁷

Ireland asked panels of randomly chosen citizens to study its hardest public questions. Their advice closely matched how the whole country later voted.⁸

One honest note: Montreal ran a $101.5 million citizen budget over three rounds, then ended it during a budget crunch.⁹ These tools only last if they are built to last.

What we could choose together

Some fixes need nobody’s permission. The city could plan its budget four years ahead instead of one, and bank the good years instead of spending them. It could run citizen budgeting at a real scale — even 1% of the building budget is about $60 million a year.¹⁰ It could create a standing residents’ council that city hall must formally answer — not obey, but answer, in writing.

Only the province can set a date to update property values. Only the province can grant the city any new tax power. Experience suggests one specific, costed ask beats a general plea.

Sources & receipts

1. 2026 operating budget $18.9B; opening gap ~$1.07B original outlook, adjusted to $1.34B — City of Toronto 2026 Budget Launch materials.
2. ~$46.5B cumulative ten-year budget pressures — City of Toronto budget materials.
3. Assessment frozen at Jan 1, 2016 values; year 10 of a scheduled 4-year cycle — MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation).
4. Province’s on-record refusal of new municipal revenue tools, January 13, 2026.
5. Ontario Ombudsman 2023–24: 42% of completed closed-meeting reviews found violations, province-wide.
6. Paris participatory budgeting: ~€100M/yr; participation 40,000→158,000 (2014–2016).
7. Brazil participatory-budgeting municipalities: infant mortality down 5–10% relative to comparable cities (Gonçalves 2014).
8. Irish Citizens’ Assembly recommendations tracked the 2018 referendum result (66.4% Yes).
9. Montreal participatory budget: $101.5M over three editions, discontinued citing austerity.
10. 1% of Toronto’s capital budget ≈ $60M/year (participatory-budgeting scale option).

This explainer went through an independent verification pass before publication (fact-check against primary sources, claim by claim). The internal verification record has been removed from this public page; the sourced facts and figures above are unchanged by that removal.