uniteTOlove.ca

Cost of Living, Food & Family Essentials

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

What’s wrong here

Toronto’s food banks recorded 4,124,313 visits in 2025 — the most ever, and 340% more than before the pandemic.1 This is bigger than any one bad year. Across Canada in 2024, about one in four people lived in a household that could not reliably afford enough food.2

Child care shows the other half of the story: real progress, unfinished. In January 2025, Ontario capped fees at centres in the federal $10-a-day program at $22 a day, and the average fell to about $19.3 That saves families thousands of dollars a year. But there are not enough spaces. As of June 2025, Ontario had created about 41,000 of the 86,000 new spaces it promised by the end of 2026 — under half, with 18 months left.3

The basic bills climb too: Toronto raised water rates 3.75% in 2025, and again in 2026.4

What’s been proven to work elsewhere

Quebec has run low-fee child care since 1997. Studies credit it with helping mothers’ employment rise faster than in the rest of the country.5

Ontario ran its own basic-income pilot in 2017–19. Most people who had jobs kept working, and about 80% reported better health and less stress. The pilot was cancelled early, but the results were studied and published.6

Philadelphia caps water bills for about 60,000 low-income households at 2–4% of their income — so a hard year cannot drown a family in one bill.7

What we could choose together

The city can build child care into buildings it already owns — libraries, community centres, schools — and aim new spaces at the neighbourhoods that have the least. The city already has a costed plan for a morning meal in every school by the 2026–27 school year: about $13.5 million a year in new operating costs to finish the rollout, on top of what’s already funded — and City staff estimate the full program will cost $20 to $60 million a year in total once every school has one.8 It can design water-bill help around income, not just a flat rebate.

Only the province sets social assistance rates — a single adult on Ontario Works gets $733 a month, a rate that has been frozen for years.9 Only the province can deliver the child-care spaces it signed up for. The federal government funds the $10-a-day deal and child benefits, and decides whether that money keeps flowing.

Every one of these is a choice with a price tag. None of them is out of reach for a city and province that decide they matter.

One question to ask any candidate: “Will you fund the plan so every Toronto student can get a morning meal at school — and starting in which school year?”

Sources & receipts

  1. 4,124,313 Toronto food bank visits, 2025; +340% vs. pre-pandemic; highest ever — Daily Bread Food Bank, October 27, 2025.
  2. 25.5% of people in ten provinces food-insecure, 2024 (~10 million people) — PROOF, May 2025.
  3. CWELCC fee cap $22/day (Jan 1, 2025), average ~$19/day; ~41,000 of 86,000 promised Ontario child-care spaces created as of June 2025 — ESDC announcement, December 4, 2025.
  4. Toronto water rate +3.75% (2025) and +3.75% interim (2026) — City of Toronto official pages.
  5. Quebec low-fee child care and maternal employment — academic literature on Quebec’s 1997 child-care program.
  6. Ontario basic-income pilot: most participants kept working; ~80% reported better health, 83% less stress — Basic Income Studies (2021) and a McMaster/Ryerson survey.
  7. Philadelphia’s Tiered Assistance Program (TAP): bills capped at 2–4% of income for ~60,000 households — Philadelphia Water Department; City of Philadelphia mayoral press release, 2017.
  8. Universal school morning meals targeted for 2026/27; $13.454M/yr new operating cost for the current rollout phase; $20–60M/yr full-program cost once fully implemented — City of Toronto Report for Action, June 3, 2025.
  9. Ontario Works single-adult rate $733/month, frozen for years; ODSP $1,408/month (July 2025).

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.