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Clean, Green & Resilient

Published 2026-07-30 · part of the research library.

This category covers a lot: clean streets, garbage, parks, snow clearing, old buildings, accessible sidewalks, flooding, and greener buildings. Toronto’s only landfill is expected to be full by 2034 or 2035. A single storm in July 2024 caused roughly $900 million in insured damage — Toronto’s third “hundred-year storm” in a decade. Most of this is squarely the City’s own job, but some pieces — like flood-plain mapping and building-code standards — belong to the province.

Where things stand

  1. Toronto’s only landfill, Green Lane, is expected to be full by 2034 or 2035. Toronto recycled or composted 50.6% of household waste in 2025, but that hides a big gap: houses hit 60.3%, while apartment towers managed only 26.3%.
  2. The city spends $143.8 million a year clearing 14,700 lane-km of roads and 7,900 km of sidewalks. In February 2025, a major storm overwhelmed sidewalks and local streets even though main roads stayed clear; residents filed more than 25,000 winter-related 311 complaints, and cleanup cost about $20 million. As of a 2025 check, 9 of 30 recommendations from earlier Auditor General audits on winter maintenance still weren’t fully in place.
  3. A single storm in July 2024 caused roughly $899 million to $940 million in insured damage and flooded more than 1,000 basements — Toronto’s third “hundred-year storm” in a decade. Ontario’s own Auditor General found only 28% of municipalities with stormwater costs in 2020 collected any dedicated revenue to pay for it. Toronto considered a dedicated stormwater fee for over a decade, then Council directed staff to indefinitely suspend it.
  4. Toronto’s parks and recreation repair backlog is projected to exceed $851 million by 2034, with current annual investment covering only 6–11% of it. In a 2023 city-wide survey, 57% of Torontonians said they visit a park or green space at least weekly.
  5. When the owner of a formally heritage-designated property applies to demolish it, city council has 90 days to decide — and if council misses that deadline, the demolition is automatically deemed approved. Separately, a 2022 provincial law gives a municipality only two years to formally designate a newly listed heritage property before losing the right to re-list it for five years — a timeline the City of Ottawa said left it having to de-list roughly 800 properties in a single year to stay ahead of it.
  6. Nationally, the single most commonly reported public-space accessibility barrier is sidewalks covered in ice or snow. Ontario set a legal goal of a fully accessible province by 2025 — a deadline the government’s own appointed reviewer said in 2023 was very unlikely to be met, and which passed without the government acknowledging it had been missed.
  7. Buildings account for 58% of Toronto’s community-wide greenhouse gas emissions, and the city has committed to retrofitting about 80% of its own buildings on the way to a net-zero target by 2040. A 2022 peer-reviewed assessment found Toronto beat its 2020 emissions target largely because Ontario closed its coal plants, and was not on track for its own 2030 target of 65% below 1990 levels.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: garbage collection, parks, snow clearing, and street cleanliness are all direct municipal responsibilities. The city can fund a stronger winter-storm response on its own — its own consultants priced a fix at $24.0 million a season, which they said “can primarily be accommodated within the City’s current winter maintenance budget.” It can also revive a scoped stormwater fee for commercial and industrial properties, a version it already studied once before shelving the whole idea. It runs its own heritage demolition-review process (the 90-day clock described above) and sets its own winter-maintenance service standards — Toronto currently plows expressways to bare pavement within 2 hours at 2.5 cm of snow, while residential streets wait for 8 cm, can take up to 14 hours, and are cleared only to “safe and passable.”

Needs the province: flood-plain mapping and river flood control belong to provincial conservation authorities, not the city. The province sets the Building Code standard for backwater valves that help prevent basement flooding — its own survey of 52 chief building officials found only 27% required them in all new homes, even though a valve costs about $250 to install versus roughly $43,000 to fix a flooded basement afterward. Accessible public spaces are governed by provincial accessibility law the city implements locally. The province also sets the two-year heritage-designation clock described above.

Two honest gaps: this page doesn’t have a solid citywide measure of everyday street cleanliness (litter, graffiti, and similar 311-tracked issues) — the park-visitation figure above is the closest available stand-in, not a cleanliness measure itself. And two related topics — the urban forest and ravine system, and long-term water infrastructure investment — aren’t yet covered in enough depth by this page’s sources to state figures here.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

Most of the levers described above sit directly with Toronto’s city council and mayor; the province controls flood-plain mapping, building-code standards, accessibility law, and the heritage-designation timeline, as noted above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign.

Sources & receipts

  1. Solid Waste Reports & Diversion Rates (fact 1).
  2. 2025 winter-storm response and Auditor General winter-maintenance recommendations — see the winter maintenance backgrounder above (fact 2).
  3. July 2024 storm damage and stormwater-fee history — see the climate adaptation & stormwater backgrounder above (fact 3).
  4. 2025 Budget Notes: Parks, Forestry and Recreation; 2025 Budget Notes: Parks, Forestry and Recreation (fact 4).
  5. 5. Demolition control | Designating Heritage Properties; Ottawa de-listing figure via the heritage preservation backgrounder above (fact 5).
  6. Barriers to Accessibility in Public Spaces: Findings from the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability; Ontario’s 2025 accessibility deadline via the accessibility backgrounder above (fact 6).
  7. City of Toronto Launches New Energy Retrofit Financing and Grant Program for Older Apartment Buildings; Assessing climate action progress of the City of Toronto; Assessing climate action progress of the City of Toronto (fact 7).
  8. Levels of Snow Clearing Service (winter-maintenance service standards, “what the city controls”).