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Technology, AI & the Automated City

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

Nobody elected the software. City staff are already testing computer programs that touch real decisions about residents — which restaurants get inspected first, whose personal data gets collected and how it’s protected, which self-driving vehicles get approved for city streets. Some of these decisions the city controls directly. Others — especially anything about what drives on Toronto’s own streets — are made entirely by the province, with the city only invited to comment.

Where things stand

  1. Toronto Public Health is testing predictive AI that would use more than 20 years of restaurant inspection records, plus 311 calls and wastewater data, to forecast which businesses are likely to break food-safety rules and decide who gets inspected first. The city’s own report on that proposal doesn’t describe a step where a person double-checks the computer’s call before an inspector acts, or a way for a flagged business to appeal — it does describe a pre-deployment bias review, a different kind of safeguard from a per-decision human check.
  2. In 2025, Toronto wrote its own AI policy in-house and — modeling the approach on how the city of San José, California does it — set out to build Canada’s first municipal “algorithmic impact assessment,” a safety check the city runs on a computer program before it helps decide something about a resident.
  3. Ontario passed amendments in 2026 (Bill 97) requiring public bodies like the City of Toronto to complete a “privacy impact assessment” — a check for how a new system will collect and protect personal information — before they start collecting that information, and to report data breaches to both the affected person and the province’s privacy watchdog. The rules take effect in stages, starting July 1, 2026 and January 1, 2027.
  4. In April 2025, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation approved a company to test self-driving delivery vehicles on Toronto’s own streets. The City of Toronto has no say over that pilot — the province only invited city staff to look it over and comment. Ontario’s Automated Vehicle Pilot Program has been extended to October 2027.
  5. Roughly 58,000 Toronto residents — about 2% of the city — still lack affordable home internet, even as more city services move onto apps and websites.
  6. Ontario’s 444 municipalities together employ more than 235,000 people — almost 4% of everyone working in the province. As automation reaches more city work over the next term, someone will decide which tasks get automated and which stay human — right now, that decision doesn’t clearly belong to anyone.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: building and enforcing its own rules for how it uses AI on residents — the algorithmic impact assessment is a city-level project, already underway; setting standards for the outside companies it hires to handle resident data, since it signs those contracts; the pace and design of digital-equity fixes, so that a resident without a smartphone, home Wi-Fi, or English isn’t the one left out as city services move online.

Needs the province: everything about what drives on Toronto’s own streets. Every decision about which self-driving vehicles get approved for Toronto’s roads is made in Queen’s Park, not City Hall — if a candidate wants the city to have a real voice over automated vehicles on its own streets, that voice has to be won from the province; it doesn’t exist today.

One honest gap: this page doesn’t yet have solid figures on the city’s broader digital-services modernization beyond the digital-equity material above. Automated-vehicle policy is also covered from a mobility angle on the Getting Around page — the two pages don’t duplicate each other, so a reader interested in AV policy specifically may want to read both.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

The city can build and enforce its own AI and data-privacy rules, as noted above; the province controls automated-vehicle regulation directly. 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. Use of Artificial Intelligence by Toronto Public Health (fact 1).
  2. Building AI Governance in Municipalities from the Ground Up (fact 2).
  3. Ontario Modernizes Its Freedom of Information and Privacy Regime (fact 3).
  4. Automated Vehicle Pilot Deployment in Toronto Under the Highway Traffic Act; Automated Vehicle Pilot Program (fact 4).
  5. Home-internet access gap — see the digital equity backgrounder above (fact 5).
  6. Careers that Build Communities: AMO's Municipal Workforce Development Project Roadmap (fact 6).