How Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow plans to fix a city in decline

It’s been a whirlwind start to Olivia Chow’s first year as mayor—a tax hike, megadollar deals with the provincial and federal governments. And yet the surface of Toronto’s problems has barely been scratched.

We arranged for a sit-down with the mayor in her City Hall office and brought a list of issues. With our start inexplicably delayed and a staff meeting looming, she sent her assistant off with an order—”Can you work it out? Close the door behind you.” And we began.

You’ve been in office for about nine months.

I’m glad someone’s doing the math.

To a lot of people living here, the city feels broken. What’s your view on the state of Toronto right now?

I ran because I saw the city—I wouldn’t go as far as broken—but in decline. The city stopped building affordable housing, TTC just had a fare increase, and their services are being cut. You walk into a park, the water fountain doesn’t work. The washroom half the time is not open. It looks scruffy. There’s cigarette butts along the sand where my grandkids were playing. And garbage—the bins are overflowing. It just wasn’t working very well. Which is why I thought, I think I can do better.

By my calculation, the recent property-tax hike puts Toronto’s tax rate at about 0.72%. It’s lower than some smaller cities, but higher than Montreal and Calgary, much higher than Vancouver.

Lower than Ottawa. Lower than Vaughan. Lower than Mississauga, Markham, Richmond Hill.

Are there any downsides to a rate that high?

I don’t accept the premise of your question, because the rate comparing to all the major cities around Toronto and in Ontario is actually lower. For 10 years now, it’s mostly cutting services. At some point, you’re talking about a city in decline. The credit rating was triple-A when I left this place. (1) When I came back, it’s double-A. Those reserves I helped set up when I was on the budget committee—rainy-day reserve, housing reserve—had been mostly raided. That’s why your credit rating goes down. Because you’re borrowing more. You can’t continue to do that. It’s not responsible. (2)

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Do you wish you’d been able to hike the tax higher?

No, I did what I needed to do. After I had that new deal with the province where we uploaded the Gardiner and the DVP, (3) and got the federal government to pay their share of the refugee shelter money and some housing dollars, after I got that, I thought, okay, I still need to do these services. I’m not gonna cut anymore. Then what is that percent? I found the percent. It was 8%. (4)

Let’s talk about the new deal. (5) For a long time, conservative politicians, particularly Doug Ford, have seemed hostile toward Toronto, and they’ve pandered to the constituents that are hostile.

That’s right.

And yet, you were able, very quickly, to pull this deal together. How did you manage that?

I looked at what he believes in. If the goal is similar, how to get there is a different question. He intervened on city business quite a few times, including changing the number of councillors in the middle of the election. By intervening so much, whether you agree with it or not, he obviously cared deeply about the city. You get to the bottom of it. “Premier, you love the city, you want to see the TTC running?” Yeah. “You want to see police keeping the city safe?” Yes. “You want kids to continue to be fed in some of the schools?” Absolutely. “You don’t want people freezing to death or sleeping on the street?” No, we don’t. “Okay, we need TTC money. We need shelter support. We need to continue to deliver city services. And it’s no joke that we have a $1.8-billion budget hole. Well, Premier, how do we do this?” That’s how I started.

I’ve heard your relationship with Doug Ford described as cozy. How would you describe it?

Honest, respectful, frank and upfront.

And how would you deal with a potential government led by Pierre Poilievre?

Same style. If your interest is helping working-class families to make life affordable, how do we do that? Do we do that by shutting down the Bloor subway line because the cars are too old? We don’t do that, because who takes the subway? Working class, especially women and immigrants, right? Do you want to say to them, “The federal government think you guys should walk?” How do they get to work? Our subway cars are old and, I’m not gonna say dying, but their lifespan is edging toward it. We need to get back on track.

I was going to talk about the TTC later, but let’s—

I’ve said no to all new projects—very nice, wonderful projects, I’ve said no. Fix what we have first, and the new things will come later. But, you know, we’re locked into FIFA. (6)

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You wouldn’t have done that?

The FIFA deal was signed before the federal and provincial governments came in with their funds. I wouldn’t have done that. Absolutely not. I went to Premier Ford and said, “We can’t shoulder this alone. Do you want the city to be a laughingstock? I can’t walk away from the bid. What do you want us to do?”

Let’s talk about the TTC. You’ve already mentioned the dysfunction. When you look at the TTC, what do you see?

For 10 years or so, it’s been neglected. The fares keep going up, the services keep going down. Lots of new lines—great, we need them—but you have to fix what you have. And you have to increase the bus service. Because 70% of the trips are by bus. So, I immediately hired 160 staff. Because 75% or 80% of TTC revenue is driven by the fare box. And when you raise fares and cut service—fewer riders. (7) Fewer riders means less revenue, meaning you’re going into a downward death spiral. So I said no more fare increase. People would come back if the service is better and if they feel safer. That’s why the 160 staff got hired. Then I hired 40 traffic agents, because the King streetcar, for example, was so slow. It’s now three times faster, because I have traffic agents directing traffic. Bam, that worked. And Scarborough transit services are just not up to par, and that’s not fair, because it shouldn’t take them an hour and a half to come downtown.

But on top of that, you have to plan for the future. So, I know I need Scarborough transit, and I waited for the province to pay. They won’t. So I said, “Alright, we’ll pay.” And that Scarborough busway is being built with 100% city money. Also, the Waterfront LRT has been talked about ever since I was on council, good lord. All those condos that are built by the waterfront, these folks have to drive. The Gardiner is clogged up because of that. The provincial and the federal government have not come in. I said, “Okay, it will take you a while to come in. We’ll design it.”

You’re designing it.

We’re designing the Waterfront LRT. We’re not actually paying to construct it; we don’t have that money. We will make the design happen so that it won’t waste time. And the Eglinton East LRT, which services Scarborough, it’s at least 20 years overdue. So, those two lines are being designed now, and we’ll continue to negotiate with the federal and provincial governments.

Let’s move to housing. Affordability issues are pushing people to the outskirts, which is putting pressure on all our services. Is density the solution?

There’s three solutions. Density is one. Much faster approval process. And seriously building affordable housing.

A while back I spoke to developer Mitchell Cohen, who said that if you wanted to increase affordable housing, you could waive the development charges and building permit fees, and waive property taxes in perpetuity on every unit of affordable housing.

Yes, we’re doing it. We’ve identified at least 70 pieces of city land, empty lots, parking lots, you name it, and we’re saying we’re going to build. We’re looking at 65,000 units of housing, and a good percentage of them we want to be affordable. But that requires infrastructure money. You can’t just build buildings. You need to have support services. Who is gonna fund that? So, in the past 10, 20 years, you can see the development charges, lot levies, inching up. Why? Because municipalities only get 9% of all the taxes you pay. Municipalities just have no money to build infrastructure. What do they do? They ask the new residents to pay. So, Mitchell Cohen is not wrong. What he has not factored in is that municipal governments don’t have the financial capacity to build infrastructure by themselves. Which is a problem.

So, where do you get that money?

The federal and provincial governments need to share some kind of revenue that would grow with the economy. For example, if Taylor Swift comes—the HST alone is huge. (8) We don’t get a penny of it. The city of Toronto ends up paying a lot of money to the police for overtime. It’s great for the economy, but in terms of revenue for the city, we actually end up paying out instead of getting any of that benefit. If tomorrow I could get one cent of what Taylor Swift is generating in Toronto, oh my god, I would have done it yesterday! I can encourage a lot of development, and the developers have to pay HST to both the federal and the provincial government. Five cents of it is GST. Do we see a penny of that? No. But do they build any infrastructure in the city? No, we do.

You’re identifying the problem. How do you solve it?

We will continue to talk to the federal and provincial governments. What I was able to do with Premier Ford is just one step. We need to get to financial sustainability for all municipalities, especially the biggest city, the generator of a huge amount of Canada’s GDP. (9) We need a source of revenue that would grow with the economy. If not, it doesn’t matter who’s the mayor, it’s not gonna be as successful as it can be.

We talked about density. What kind of density do you want to see? European-style, where all the avenues—

Six to eight storeys, that’s right.

Some would suggest 10 to 12.

Go for eight. It depends on how wide the road is. And yes, it is coming through council. Four units as a house, laneway houses, granny flats—go for it. Making it simpler so homeowners can get the financing, get the planning, get the building permits, all in one shot. That makes it a lot faster. We are really encouraging rental housing, because not everybody has enough money to buy a condo, right?

How are you encouraging rentals?

If it’s affordable units, we make more exemptions. We can provide a bit more density, and if it is near a transit corridor, the density can be negotiated. All of that matters. And when the city identifies land, by and large we want to build rental housing and not condominiums, because condos are being built anyway.

Let’s move quickly to traffic. The gridlock in this city is the worst in North America. (10) How do you begin to address it?

Well, there’s AI for transfer signals. There are more traffic wardens. There is construction that you need to coordinate.

An expert at U of T said part of the problem is construction everywhere all at once.

And companies close the road to do construction. We don’t charge them much. And if they go, “Oh, we need six more months”—hang on a second. I want a lot more money out of them, so there is a financial incentive for them to build faster. If you have an escalating cost, the longer you close the road, the more you pay. And if you miss this deadline, you pay even more. Which is what I’m asking the staff to look at. And we have 60,000 Uber drivers. They are contributing to the congestion. So, all of those elements, you can take action on each of them.

Downtown office vacancies. The rate right now is 17.4%—

It’s connected with congestion. Because people are saying, “We don’t want to travel.” So, I’ve met with four bank CEOs now, and one more to come. They’re all saying that, at most, it’s three days a week. I said, “How do I get it to four days? And five days?”

You want people here five days a week.

I want them to be here at least four days, if not five. And they said, “It’s not possible.” I said, “We need to figure out a way to have more people coming.” So, they are working with the city, looking at congestion, looking at revitalizing the downtown, because the small businesses that rely on the office people coming back are not doing very well. The food court is empty.

You need a new chief planner. What are you looking for?

Somebody who actually has a plan to get all these approval processes done faster, simpler, and provide good planning policy to help smaller homeowners, not big developers.

For a long time, city planning seemed to be about saying no. Gregg Lintern seemed to start the process of allowing things to happen, like laneway homes.

Yes. There’s gonna be a lot more of that. It’s policy and practice. He did some of the policy, and we now need to do the practice.

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1. Chow was a downtown city councillor from 1992 to 2005.

2. As Chow herself said in defending the hike: “I’ll be blunt: I inherited a financial mess, a $1.8-billion hole in the budget. We can’t avoid hard choices anymore.”

3. That’s the Gardiner Expressway, which runs across the bottom of the city, along the lakeshore, and the Don Valley Parkway, a major north-south artery.

4. Various media reported a 9.5% tax hike. Chow insists the rise was 8% with an extra 1.5% for a previously locked-in building levy imposed by Rob Ford.

5. In December, the city and province struck a deal in which Toronto made certain commitments, including conceding Ontario’s authority to make decisions about Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre. In return, the city would get up to $1.2 billion in operating supports over three years for various projects and up to $7.6 billion in capital relief, funding for 55 new TTC subway trains, and upload responsibility for the Gardiner and DVP to the province.

6. Recent reports estimate that hosting the FIFA World Cup will cost Toronto $380 million.

7. In 2023, paid rides totalled 396.3 million—an average of 74% the rate pre-COVID.

8. It’s called Swiftonomics—the Eras Tour (which lands in Toronto for five nights in November) is expected to generate close to US$5 billion in consumer spending in the U.S. Every US$100 spent on concerts generates roughly $300 in spending on hotels, food and transit. Swifties are spending an estimated US$1,300 to US$1,500.

9. Toronto generates 50% of Ontario’s GDP and 20% of Canada’s.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of former city planner Gregg Lintern. This version has been corrected.