Ending Homelessness in Toronto · Chapter 6

The Levers of Power: Who Decides, Who Pays

A chapter of Ending Homelessness in Toronto — this project’s receipt-backed book on ending homelessness for less than the crisis costs now. Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, the text says so on its face. How the checking works: how we verify · corrections.

Every recommendation in this book runs into the same structural fact: homelessness policy in Toronto is split across three governments with different incentives, different budget cycles, and no shared accountability for the outcome. Understanding who actually controls each lever is a precondition for pulling it.

The City of Toronto: delivery, without full control of the funding

The City directly funds and operates Toronto's shelter system and homelessness prevention programs through Toronto Shelter and Support Services, but only a fraction of that budget is under the City's own control. Of the $897.96-million gross 2025 budget, $241.2 million came from the municipal property-tax levy, $311.2 million from federal transfers, and $286.1 million from the province (City of Toronto, 2025 Budget Notes, Toronto Shelter and Support Services). It is worth flagging honestly that these three figures, added together, come to $838.5 million — about $59.5 million, or 6.6%, short of the stated $897.96-million gross total. This book's own independently sourced total-revenue figure for the same budget, $656.778 million, points to the same roughly $59.5-million gap. That gap is nameable from the same budget document: contributions from reserves (about $57.1 million), plus sundry revenue, transfers from capital, and inter-divisional recoveries, together make up the roughly $59.5-million difference. Separately, the relationship between this $311.2-million general federal-transfer figure and the $300-million refugee-response-specific federal line discussed below has not been established against any primary source checked to date: whether the $300 million is a subset of the $311.2 million, or an additional line, remains an open question this book flags rather than guesses at.

The clearest illustration of how exposed that funding structure makes the City: federal funding for the City's refugee-response program fell from $300 million in the 2025 budget to a budgeted $97.078 million for 2026, a cut of roughly 68%, or $202.9 million, in a single year, while the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit allocation to Toronto fell from $38 million in 2024 to $19.75 million in 2025 to $7.95 million in 2026, eliminating support for roughly 530 households — a count this book's re-verification could not re-locate in the cited primary record, flagged as unconfirmed — (City of Toronto, "Cuts to Federal and Provincial Support for Housing," 2025; 2026 Budget Notes). The City's own words on why this matters: "COHB is the single most effective tool we have for freeing up beds in our shelter system so that more people can come indoors from streets and parks." A City cannot run a rapid-rehousing plan like the one in Chapter 5 on a funding stream that can be cut 79% in one budget cycle by a government it does not control.

Ontario: the biggest funder, and the veto-holder over municipal tools

Ontario funds the largest share of Toronto's homelessness system, but administers almost none of it directly, flowing money instead through 47 municipal Consolidated Municipal Service Managers and District Social Services Administration Boards, of which Toronto is one, via the Homelessness Prevention Program, which provided $106.3 million to Toronto in 2025. This book is not able to stand behind a specific proportional breakdown of provincial-versus-municipal-versus-federal homelessness-program spending that has circulated in earlier drafts — an extensive search of Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Financial Accountability Office of Ontario sources found no primary source supporting a precise split, so this book states the topic, that Ontario is the largest funder, without repeating a specific figure it cannot verify.

Ontario also holds a decisive, and recently demonstrated, veto over Toronto's own housing tools. City Council passed Toronto's Inclusionary Zoning bylaw in November 2021, with an original plan to raise affordability requirements as high as 8–16% by 2030; the province did not approve the zones needed for the bylaw to take effect until August 15, 2025 — nearly four years later — and when it did, it simultaneously capped the requirement at a flat 5%, cut the affordability term from Toronto's proposed 99 years to 25 years, and exempted purpose-built rental altogether (City of Toronto, Inclusionary Zoning Policy; Social Planning Toronto, "City of Toronto's Inclusionary Zoning Bylaw Finally Takes Effect After Years of Provincial Delay"). Under the bylaw as it now stands, requirements do not apply to any development application submitted before July 1, 2027 — meaning, in practice, essentially no inclusionary-zoning units will exist for years after the policy's original 2021 passage. Ontario's More Homes Built Faster Act, 2022 similarly overrode municipal planning decisions in Hamilton and Halton Region to force urban-boundary expansion those councils had voted against, while defining "affordable" housing eligible for its development-charge exemptions as 80% of average market rent rather than tied to household income — a standard housing researchers at the University of British Columbia's Housing Assessment Resource Tools project have specifically criticized as weak relative to their recommended 20% social housing / 80% genuinely affordable, perpetual-term standard.

The federal government: the legislated right, and the newest money

Ottawa's role rests on the National Housing Strategy Act, 2019, which recognizes "the progressive realization" of the right to adequate housing as a matter of Canadian law, and created both a Federal Housing Advocate — housed within the Canadian Human Rights Commission, empowered to convene review panels on systemic housing issues — and a National Housing Council including ex officio seats for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Indigenous Services Canada, and the Advocate. The Advocate's most recent full annual report found Canada's National Housing Strategy "far behind" its goal of eliminating homelessness by 2030, and that less than 5% of units created under major federal programs are affordable to households in the deepest core housing need (Federal Housing Advocate, "Advocating for Change: The Housing Crisis in Canada," 2022–2023 Annual Report). Ottawa's principal delivery vehicle for homelessness specifically is Reaching Home, a $5-billion, nine-year (2019–2028) program funding Toronto directly as a "Designated Community" — $211.1 million for 2024–2028. A newer Crown agency, Build Canada Homes, launched in September 2025 with $13 billion in initial funding, $1 billion earmarked specifically for transitional and supportive housing (launched September 14, 2025). A separate federal announcement (Government of Canada news release, October 30, 2025) launched a $45-million, three-year Homelessness Reduction Innovation Fund administered by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, with its first round distributing nearly $7 million across 16 communities — a genuine, if still modest, federal bet on the Built for Zero methodology described in Chapter 5.

The City's own Housing Secretariat tracks capital commitments outstanding by order of government for the HousingTO plan, and the picture is instructive about where the real gaps sit. As of the 2024–2025 Annual Progress Report, the City had committed approximately $6.4 billion to date, with approximately $4.1 to $4.6 billion in funding still outstanding; the federal government had committed approximately $4.0 billion to date, with approximately $7.5 to $8 billion in funding, plus $5.4 to $6.0 billion in financing, still outstanding; and the provincial government had committed approximately $1.9 billion to date, with approximately $8.7 to $9.1 billion in funding, plus $6.4 to $7.0 billion in financing, still outstanding. That is an update on the prior year's snapshot — $3 to $3.5 billion City, $7.6 to $8.1 billion federal, $9.1 to $9.6 billion provincial outstanding — both figures confirmed, though the earlier ones are now stale (City of Toronto, Housing Secretariat, 2024–2025 Annual Progress Report). By this accounting, the province has committed the least relative to what its own plan calls for, of any of the three governments.

Indigenous governance as its own lever, not a subset of municipal or provincial power

Reconciliation, in this specific policy area, has a concrete institutional meaning: Indigenous organizations are asking not for a bigger slice of existing funding streams but for the authority to design and administer their own. The National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc. operates nationally on an explicit "For Indigenous, By Indigenous" mandate; in Toronto, the Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle — not City staff — administers the City's 20% Indigenous Funding Stream, a governance structure the City's own 2018 "Meeting in the Middle" agreement with the Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council established at Indigenous organizations' request, including a call for "Indigenous data ownership/local Indigenous authority" over homelessness data specifically (City of Toronto and Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council, "Meeting in the Middle," June 2018). The Assembly of First Nations' National First Nations Homelessness Action Plan, approved by First Nations-in-Assembly in 2023, states this as a first-order objective: "First Nations jurisdiction over homelessness services," alongside closing the on-reserve infrastructure gap that the Assembly's own “Closing the Infrastructure Gap by 2030” analysis costs at roughly $135 billion. Reconciliation on homelessness, as the organizations doing this work define it, means treating Indigenous jurisdiction as a fourth lever of power alongside the City, the province, and the federal government — not folding it into any of the other three.

Who else is pulling these levers

A cluster of community organizations shapes this policy space and holds all three governments to account: the Toronto Alliance to End Homelessness, whose stated vision is that "homelessness in Toronto is rare, brief and non-recurring" and which runs the City's homelessness data dashboard and coordinates sector-wide planning; the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, a specialty legal clinic providing direct representation and law-reform advocacy for low-income tenants; ACORN Canada, a tenant membership organization campaigning on renovictions and rent control; and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness nationally, which administers Built for Zero Canada and the Homelessness Reduction Innovation Fund and has proposed a national "Canada Housing Accord" to coordinate all three governments around shared, funded targets. None of these organizations can compel funding on their own; their leverage is evidence, public pressure, and — as the Ombudsman findings in Chapter 4 show — sometimes formal accountability mechanisms the City itself has been forced to answer to.