Some initial notes! Will Curran Stikuts be the tallest councillor in the City’s history, as his swearing-in photo suggests, or does he just have short supporters? I’ll report back. Diana Chan McNally got a fist bump from retiring Councillor Gord Perks after signing. We’ll see if it passed along any of his penchant for fiery speeches. Also posing for photos with celebrity City Clerk John Elvidge: Chiara Padovani, Michael Thompson, Shaun Chen, Amber Morley and probably some others I missed.

To help get the sworn-in councillors — and the rest of us — ready for the new term, I’ve got a special guest today. Prolific City Hall idea generator George Bell has put together a list of eight things that could improve Council over the next term. Everything from procedural changes to a ban on driving while attending Council meetings. It’s a good list.

Also: Premier Doug Ford’s speed camera ban is one year old this week. Let’s check in on how speeding traffic has changed.

Let’s get into it.

✨ This issue runs a bit long. If it gets cut off in your email client, read it on the web.

— Matt Elliott

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Eight rule changes that would make this term of Council better

By George Bell

It’s time — a new Council session is upon us. Excitement is in the air. The mayor has a new mandate, full of promises (although maybe not as many as supporters would have liked). New councillors will bring new personalities and new ideas to the City. A new speaker will provide flow and tonal changes to Council business. New committees will dig into the challenges facing Toronto. It’s all very exciting — especially for all of us civic nerds!

Before Council gets too far into all that, though, it’s worth taking a few minutes of self-reflection about the last four years and considering if there are any improvements they could make up front to the functioning of our local government.

As with any government, there is a need to update our rules and procedures from time to time. Improving governance, closing loopholes, making better use of technology and ensuring that we focus on what’s important.

Council has occasionally put forward a few rule changes at the beginning of new sessions to patch up some of the issues that have cropped up over the previous session. Some of these smaller changes often happen in the first few meetings of Council and have in the past included changes to make virtual participation permanent, creating deputy mayors and minor delegation of Vision Zero items. In some cases — like when the province imposed changes to Council size — entire sub-committees have been created to work through all the changes required.

So with that precedent in mind, I’ve put together eight rule changes and one bonus that I think would benefit this upcoming Council. If nothing else, they might make Matt’s job a bit easier over the next four years.

#1: No more driving during meetings

During the previous round of Council, there were at least three reported instances of councillors driving during Council or committee meetings. One of these even happened during a Council debate on a Vision Zero road safety item.

The province’s website on distracted driving states that “it is illegal to have a display screen visible to the driver that is unrelated to driving, such as a computer or video.”

Besides the obvious risk to the public, there is reputational and legal risk if an incident were to happen during a Council or committee meeting. Even if nobody is hurt, driving during Council is picked up by local news and becomes a major story the next day.

The rules around virtual access to meetings were put in place during COVID and made permanent in 2023. Some further guardrails are necessary to ensure that everything is happening in a safe manner.

A simple “Point of Community Safety” could be added to Council procedures. It would require the Clerk or Speaker to verify that the person on screen was not driving a vehicle and to prevent them from speaking until the situation was fixed. This would apply to councillors, deputants and staff.

I’ve been personally trying to see if there were other avenues to tackle this — by making an unofficial request to the Integrity Commissioner’s office. Unfortunately, without an HTA conviction in hand, they aren’t able to proceed with a Code of Conduct complaint.

#2: Report prioritization

There has always been a report black hole at City Council. It’s time to close it.

Starting in 2019, the Clerk began publishing a public report log. It has given structure and visibility to the reporting process. Prior to this, report requests were often forgotten by councillors and the public almost as soon as voting was complete.

But there is still a massive number of reports that never see the light of day.

At the end of the 2018-2022 Council, all outstanding reports for that session of Council were tossed into the black hole. A few days ago, the same was done with the 2022-2026 reports. In City terminology, the reports are NCF (Not Carried Forward). No further work will be done on them, unless they are re-introduced at Council.

As you can see from the graphs, more than 58% of requested reports from 2018-2026 were never completed. Only about 12% of the reports in 2026 were completed.

Council needs to do some work to ensure that they are getting back a larger percentage of reports than they have historically.

Some potential avenues to improve this are:

• hiring more staff to work on reports

• requiring report requests to include language on priority, timing and scale/effort

• putting upper limits on costs or staff time

• providing Council with an array of report types that could be requested (brainstorm, options, detailed, third party)

• requiring report features with long lead times and more staff time — like surveys, consultation or mailings — to be explicitly requested

It may also be worth creating a process where committees, Council or the mayor could change the priority or even eliminate report requests over time.

More data should be included in the report data sheet, including priority, timing, sizing, scoping, report type and long lead-time features. This will help future councils and the public better understand what is happening here.

Finally, it would also be very helpful for the origin of report requests to be maintained, as there is some evidence that certain councillors and committees are less successful at getting reports returned by staff.

#3: Track official Council communications

While we are on the subject of black holes, a very similar thing happens to official communications from City Council.

Many items include directions to do things like “Ask the Province to change XYZ law” or “Ask Metrolinx to build ABC”. These official requests are sometimes delegated “Ask the Mayor to talk to…” or “Ask the City Manager to coordinate with…”. Sometimes these communications are emails, letters, or phone calls. Sometimes they are more in-depth conversations or meetings.

The end result seems to be the same, though: communications disappear into a black hole. Sometimes they return responses in future items, but often not. It’s often not clear if the communication was actually sent, and it can be challenging to track down what it contained, or who performed the communication. Communication trails can go dark as staff change.

And forget about finding out what the responses to these communications were. Even by FOI. Even just asking to confirm the communication was sent, or its contents, seems to result in dead ends or significant amounts of work.

An official communication log is one way to fix this. Initially, it would contain some basic information, a link to the official communication if available or meeting dates and attendees, and potentially the responses when it is reasonable to include them. More information could be added as the system matures (including confidential communications that only councillors could see).

This would add credibility to the City’s efforts to work with other levels of government, and help keep Council objectives in the public eye. It would also help City Council understand if further communication is needed, or if their request has been responded to.

FOI matters would also be simplified, as you could request all communications resulting from an item.

#4: Update time limits on deputations

Currently, deputations at committee are five minutes. However, if there are a lot of deputations on a specific day, this number is often lowered to three minutes by committee vote.

The problem this creates is that hot-button items with many deputations (often in agreement with each other — or even from the same organization) can reduce the time for everyone else, including lone deputants speaking on more obscure items.

Deputants who have planned for five-minute speeches must trim content in real time — often resulting in confusing speeches that run up against the time limit.

Further, there is an ongoing risk of large numbers of remote deputants causing havoc with meetings.

My proposal is to codify the time limits on a per-item basis instead of on a per-meeting basis:

• If there are three or fewer deputants on an item: five minutes — in person or remote

• If there are four or more deputants on an item: three minutes — in person or remote

• If there are eight or more deputants on an item: three minutes — in person only

A further update would require the chair to hold a vote on ending deputations after deputation 12 and every eight deputations after that for each item.

#5: Pre-recorded video deputations

Council should allow for submission of video deputations (up to three minutes), and add improvements to TMMIS to allow these to be viewed and voted on.

The top-voted videos would be shown during breaks at committee and Council (on the live stream, and in the room). This would give the public an opportunity to comment, even if they have work or other commitments.

These could be creative and not just talking heads.

Some third-party work might be needed behind the scenes to ensure that videos meet community guidelines.

This would add an extra dimension to deputations by allowing everyone to participate. If the rules were extended to allow for councillors to play one or two selected videos during committee, it could potentially improve debate and bring in voices that are otherwise being excluded — a huge win for community involvement in government.

#6: Staff question day upfront

Senior Staff time is valuable, and Council has a habit of requiring many staff to hang around for large parts of Council in the off chance that they are needed for questioning. When they are questioned, it often feels rushed, with time limits imposed.

I propose that City Council implement a full day of staff questions, which would occur two or three days ahead of Council meetings.

Councillors would indicate prior to the meeting which items they had questions on, ensuring that the proper staff were in attendance. Questioning would proceed as normal, with second and third rounds of questioning available as time allows. The meeting would be time-bound to business hours.

There may be ways to further optimize this by pre-submitting questions and trying to maximize time on complicated items by getting simple ones out of the way first. Further rule changes could be made to limit questions on these items at Council.

#7: Eliminate the Speaker’s Member Motion boilerplate

A big chunk of every meeting is taken up by the Member Motions boilerplate — this is a repetitive, almost mantra-like series of statements by the speaker followed by a voice vote. At 15-30 seconds a piece, over sometimes hundreds of member motions, there seems to be an opportunity to simplify this system.

“MM43.111 this motion has been deemed urgent by the chair, this motion is not subject to a vote to waive referral, this motion has been added to the agenda before council for debate. On the item — all in favor of the item — carried.”

— Former Speaker Councillor Frances Nunziata, 138 (!) times at the last Council meeting of the 2022-2026 term

Some options: have a hold system for member motions, and bulk-add/approve any unheld item. Alternatively, batch them in groups of 10, or by the councillor who submitted them.

The challenge here is to get all the items added quickly, while ensuring that councillors have time to flag any as problematic.

#8: Create opportunity for deputations on items added at the last minute

There are a number of ways that Council and staff can get items on the agenda with little or no chance for the public to speak. Some ways include:

• Member motions, because deputants can’t speak at Council

• Any new business from staff at Council, because deputants can’t speak at Council

• Any business added less than 24 hours before a committee meeting

• Any business added after the committee meeting has started

In some cases, it seems that there is an abuse of this, as councillors or staff get to avoid having the public speak on items by submitting them at the last minute.

We saw signs of this in July, when hundreds of speed-calming projects had been added to Community Council agendas at the last minute. Clearly not an emergency, and much of the work was likely ready long before the items were submitted. Making this even worse: many of these items were delegated to those Community Councils, so they didn’t even get a second vote at Council. The short timing combined with a single vote is not ideal.

It would be wise to require any item added less than five business days before the meeting to have deputations at the next meeting when requested by the public.

For member motions and last-minute business at Council, deputations should be held at the next Executive Committee meeting, if requested by the public.

This reduces the incentive to submit items at the last minute and ensures the public gets their say on all items.

Bonus: Develop policies for AI submissions, AI deputations and agentic voting

It’s likely that during this term of Council we will have to reckon with AI deputants. Maybe even an AI Councillor, Mayor or Staff member. We likely have already had many AI submissions via email, and maybe even in some staff reports. AI use in the election was real, but so far seemingly innocuous.

But what happens when AI agents start reaching out to staff in a coordinated way, or your councillor gets their AI doppelgänger to stand in at Council while they are on vacation (or driving!)? What if the next consultation on zoning is flooded with extremely knowledgeable bots from a development company?

Some AI use will be necessary, but we’re going to need to make sure our systems are safe and up to date. Faster and more accurate responses from 311 or your councillor’s office would be great.

But where is the line drawn? Can an AI agent vote instead of a councillor? Can it talk to constituents? We need to start figuring this out and codifying some of it — while leaving some questions unanswered and allowing experimentation to take place.

It would be good to have a subcommittee with some experts in the field giving the City some ideas, pointing out risks and working on finding good places to integrate AI into our system.

I’m not proposing any rule changes here at the moment, but we need to be ready for some if things get out of hand.

Thanks to George for his contribution! I’m currently accepting freelance pitches for 2027. All contributions are paid, and paid promptly. If you’re a writer with an idea for some City Hall analysis or reporting, get in touch.

And if you want to help support this kind of independent journalism, become a paid subscriber. It costs just six bucks a month or sixty dollars per year — a bargain and a deal.

— Matt Elliott

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Charted: Doug Ford’s speed camera ban, one year later

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City Hall won’t show many signs of life until the first Council meeting of the new term on November 18. Between now and then, enjoy the silence.

One last stray thought about Mayor Olivia Chow’s campaign. I’ve watched her run for m…

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In case you missed it: Mayor Olivia Chow is still the mayor. She recorded an impressive 532,201 votes — though those numbers still need to be certified by the City Clerk — which is more than any other mayoral candidate in the city’s history. Not too shabby.

Chow won 19 of 25 wards, inclu…

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ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES

• 📽️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection — updated with new polls

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ Browse Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 📊 Search the Council Scorecard

• 🤑 Review the Campaign Cash Archive

Good morning. There are zero days left until Election Day. It’s today. Polls are open.

To get you set, consider this a special edition of City Hall Watcher, with your guide to election night.

LIVE RESULTS: Courtesy Alex Olson, City Hall Watcher’s Projection Section will include LIVE results and projections, as the data starts rolling in after 8 p.m.

➡️ You can follow along here.

This is a first-time experiment, so let us know if you notice any problems with the data feed. Alex is available on Bluesky if you want to report any issues.

FINAL PROJECTION: A flurry of polls were added to City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection site late yesterday. All of them were good news for Olivia Chow.

• Mainstreet Research: Chow +6

• Pallas Data: Chow +10

• Pollara: Chow +9

• Forum Research: Chow +10

• Liaison Strategies: Chow +8

The polls reversed a trend that had been seeing Brad Bradford grow his support.

As a result, the projection now finds Chow winning in 67% of simulated elections, or about two-thirds. That’s an improvement for the incumbent over her position last week, when the race looked like it could be a real coin-flip contest.

But of course it’s worth remembering that these kinds of odds don’t mean anything is in the bag just yet. If the forecast suggests a 33% chance of rain, you might still pack an umbrella.

WHAT’S AT STAKE: 🗞️ In the Toronto Star today, you can find me doing my level best to convince people to vote. If big issues like transit and taxes don’t motivate you, how about toilets?

LIVE COVERAGE: I’ll be appearing live on CBC’s election night special. You can watch live on YouTube, or enjoy it via many other platforms.

The stream will fire up at 7 p.m. I fully intended to get a haircut before this but, well, whoops.

THE DAY AFTER: Tomorrow, City Hall Watcher #407 will be published, bringing you my first cut of analysis about what happened and what it means for Council going forward. You won’t want to miss it. There’s going to be a lot of charts.

If you’re not a City Hall Watcher subscriber, you can sign up here. You’ll get the post-election edition straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

You can also catch the Star’s Mahdis Habibinia and me talking about the electoral fallout on CBC Here & Now at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, with host Farrah Merali.

And because sleep is seriously overrated, I’ll be doing a panel for CivicTechTO at City Hall on Tuesday at 7 p.m. If you want to hear me, The Green Line’s Anita Li and Lanrick Bennett Jr. talk more about what happened, you can RSVP to attend.

Thanks for reading and supporting independent municipal election coverage.

Into the breach, friends. I’ll see you on the other side.

— Matt Elliott

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Candidate Chaos: Parental endorsements, washrooms, and weddings

ENDGAME ENDORSEMENTS: Conservative group ABC Toronto has made some extra endorsements, naming Davenport’s Marco Martins, Spadina-Fort York’s Ian Cunningham, University-Rosedale’s Terri Hawkes and Karina Lemke, Toronto-St. Paul’s Jenny Kalimbet, Toronto Centre’s Daniel Tate and Scarborough North’s Shaun Chen.

I’ve also added some endorsements from the extra-conservative group IntegrityTO. They’re backing Martins, York South-Weston’s Daniel Di Giorgio, and Toronto-Danforth’s Caryma Sa’d.

🕶️ The Endorsement Matrix has been updated

Josh Matlow, seemingly quite confident that he’ll cruise to victory today, continues to spend time endorsing candidates in other wards. Last week, he took a trip to Etobicoke North to back candidate Ala’a Adib.

Valerie Bradford, Liberal MP and mother to Brad Bradford, has endorsed James Pasternak in York Centre.

Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles is backing Davenport’s Alejandra Bravo.

Former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall is backing Ausma Malik in Spadina-Fort York. Former MPP Glen Murray is supporting her opponent, Ian Cunningham.

Etobicoke-Lakeshore’s Amber Morley has the endorsement of former top doc Eileen de Villa. She also secured the endorsement of former councillor (and current MP) Jennifer McKelvie, which is notable as Morley is firmly on Chow’s team while McKelvie has been backing Bradford.

Former Prime Minister Joe Clark (Who?) has endorsed University-Rosedale’s Terri Hawkes. Former Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker — whose name I can still spell accurately from memory alone — has endorsed Scarborough Rouge Park’s Neethan Shan. Former mayor David Miller is supporting Chiara Padovani in York South-Weston.

In Scarborough Southwest, Kevin Rupasinghe has been endorsed by his parents. Good get.

ANTI-ENDORSEMENTS: Left-wing group Progress Toronto has released their list of the “least wanted.” These are candidates the group is targeting to lose. They named mayoral candidate Brad Bradford, York South-Weston’s Frances Nunziata, Etobicoke North’s Vince Crisanti and Toronto Centre’s Daniel Tate.

BRIEFLY:

• In Toronto Centre, both incumbent Chris Moise and challenger Curran Stikuts posted photos of themselves alongside Olivia Chow, implying that they each have the mayor’s support.

• In Parkdale-High Park, Nadia Guerrera hit opponent Diana Chan McNally over reports that McNally has been banned from Queen’s Park. “It's hard to be at the table if you're not allowed in the room.”

• University-Rosedale contender Mike Layton, presumably feeling pretty good about his own electoral chances, took a bit of time to hit mayoral candidate Brad Bradford over a 2019 vote to prevent the TTC from reporting on maintenance spending.

• Candidates in Beaches-East York are eyeing the end of the contract to provide food service at Woodbine Beach. Initially awarded to Tuggs, the sole-source deal is finally set to expire in 2028. Nate Erskine-Smith is pitching a “marketplace of local artisans and entrepreneurs” as one idea. Candidate James Dann, accompanied by MPP Mary-Margaret McMahon, wants some “really innovative food and beverage ideas.”

• University-Rosedale’s Keenan Courtis has been sending a strong pro-cycling message at the protests against the Bloor West bike lane removal. “Make them struggle for every inch.”

• Former mayor John Tory recorded a robocall encouraging voters in Scarborough North to support candidate Han Dong.

• Etobicoke North’s Chloe Brown has a proposal for controlling the police budget: cut paid duty.

• Scarborough-Guildwood’s Paul Ainslie thinks park washrooms should still be open in October. When you got to go, you got to go.

• Toronto Centre candidate Joe Cadeau keeps getting confused with Bill Gates. (Updated Oct 26, 10:24 a.m.: Including by me, apparently! This section has been updated from an earlier version that listed Cadeau’s first name as Bill.)

• Scarborough-Agincourt’s Jax Ho took a brief pause from his election campaign to get married. He had his wedding officiant help record a campaign message. Do you have to pay extra for that?

The week at Toronto City Hall

MONDAY: 🗳️ It’s Election Day. Go vote! It’s fun.

ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES

• 📽️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection — updated with new polls

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ Browse Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 📊 Search the Council Scorecard

• 🤑 Review the Campaign Cash Archive

It’s the final countdown. There are seven days left before Election Day. There’s some definite light at…

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ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES

• 📽️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection — updated with new polls

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ Browse Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 📊 Search the Council Scorecard

• 🤑 Review the Campaign Cash Archive 🆕

Hope the turkey was good. There are 13 days left until Election Day. Lucky us.

For a lot of people, th…

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ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ Browse Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 📽️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection

• 📊 Search the Council Scorecard

There are 21 days left until Election Day.

And for a lot of people, there’s less than that. Early voting kicks off tomorrow, October 6, and runs through October 11. In past elections, Toronto voters have enjoyed voting early. About one in five voters cast their ballot at early polls or by mail in the 2023 by-election.

If the same early enthusiasm holds, by this time next week the election will already be over for a large chunk of the city.

So now seems like a really good time to look at where things stand. In this issue, I’ve brought back Alex Olson to tell us about what City Hall Watcher’s projection site thinks about the mayoral race, and how it might move over the next 21 very important days.

Also: it’s a new month, so I’ve got LOBBYIST WATCH, featuring notes on garbage trains, a plan to put people to work on farms, and more.

And CANDIDATE CHAOS rolls on, with endorsements from characters both real and fictional.

Wait, there’s more: notes on Bloor Street bike counts, the property tax hike Brad Bradford intends to keep, and a visual look at Toronto’s past elections.

Let’s get into it.

✨ It’s election season. This issue runs long. If it gets cut off in your email client, read it on the web.

— Matt Elliott

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Poll positions: where the mayoral race stands — and how it might change

By Alex Olson

Despite occasional headlines to the contrary, this has been a mayoral race with remarkably unshifting opinions. Polls have stayed within a few points of each other, with no clear trend one way or the other.

Our model reflects this, showing a slow-but-steady increase in Mayor Olivia Chow’s chances of winning from around 70% on August 25 to about 75% now. That increase is caused primarily by two factors: first, the number of polls showing more or less the same thing increases our model’s confidence that this is basically what will happen. Second, Councillor Brad Bradford is running out of time to shift public opinion, and he needs it to shift a lot in order to win.

In spite of this, our model is still giving Bradford about a one-in-four chance of winning the election. To understand why, let’s take a look at some of the scenarios that might swing things yet.

What if Bradford gets a big endorsement?

In 2023, in the final weeks of the by-election, Ana Bailão jumped from third in polling to a close contender to Chow. One big reason for this was a raft of high-profile endorsements late in the day. Most notably, after promising to stay out of the race, John Tory endorsed Bailão with only a few days to go. This time Tory has again signalled his intention to keep out of the race, which leads many to wonder whether he will ultimately make an endorsement.

For an endorsement to make a difference, support needs to come from somewhere. In 2023, the field of candidates was especially fragmented.

For this analysis, I’ve looked at the four past mayoral elections where there were at least three polls, from at least three pollsters, in the last three weeks before the election. Along the bottom axis of this chart is the gap between the winner and the second-place candidate in terms of vote share in polling (so further to the left means a smaller lead); along the side is the number of “effective candidates”, which you can think of as representing how many genuine challengers each race saw.

What we can see is that the 2026 race is pretty normal in terms of the gap between the top two candidates, but on the lower end in terms of the effective number of candidates. On the other hand, 2023 is also normally competitive, but on the extreme end of fragmentation. This meant that there were many other candidates for Bailão to pull support from in the final days, which is exactly what polling from that election shows:

Post-Tory endorsement, Chow’s support rate remained largely constant, while Bailão jumped at the cost of the many other candidates in the race. Unfortunately for Bradford, this time around the race is already largely consolidated. In the final week of polling, Bailão’s gain was equivalent to about a quarter of the support held by other candidates at the start of that week. The same gain from today’s much smaller pool would give Bradford only about 2.6 points, leaving him still behind Chow.

What if Alexander drops out?

As the field of candidates is finalized, nobody currently on the ballot can “drop out” and have their name removed. However, Chris Alexander could still announce he does not want to be mayor and ask that the electorate vote for someone else.

Luckily for us, Mainstreet Research included a version of this question in last week’s poll. They included a forced choice between Bradford and Chow, letting us see exactly what might happen if Alexander changes his mind.

Interestingly, this seems to hardly affect the race at all. Chow rises about nine points, and so does Bradford.

So what would it take for our model to see Bradford as equivalently competitive to Chow? I ran three scenarios to explore what it would take for Bradford and Chow to have about even chances of winning, depending on how dramatic the shift in polling would need to be (and how many polls would need to show it):

A single bombshell poll showing the lead completely flipped would effectively double Bradford’s chances, but would not be enough to consider him the presumptive winner. This makes sense — that poll would be flying in the face of all previous evidence, and we would take it seriously but with some caution. More plausible would be a small number of strong polling leads — three polls showing Bradford up five points (still a seventeen-point swing from today!) or twelve polls showing a tied race would be enough. None of these scenarios seem particularly likely given the consistency of polling we have observed, however.

My view today is that on the eve of this election, our model will likely give Brad Bradford between a 20 and 25% chance of winning. This is not an insignificant chance, by any means, and it’s always important to remember the limitations of this exercise — on the night of the 2016 US presidential election, the New York Times gave Donald Trump a 15% chance of winning. It was unlikely, but unlikely is very different from impossible.

What about those ward-level polls?

A quick note on the five ward-level polls Forum Research released. In 2022, Forum published six ward-level polls, which often badly misstated the size of the lead (though all six poll leaders did win):

There isn’t enough historical data to properly model the results for the five wards from this year’s polling, but we can use the average-case and worst-case error from the 2022 polling to get a sense of the range in which results may land.

Out of the five, Beaches-East York shows the most commanding lead — however, even here the error bar is wide enough that the outcome is far from certain. Whatever ward you live in, don’t forget that early voting starts tomorrow, October 6 — and definitely don’t miss Kids Vote Weekend on October 10 and 11!

City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection site is a free resource, but you can show your support — and get access to the rest of this issue — by becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll also be supporting local indie journalism.

Subscribe now

Lobbyist Watch for September 2026: All aboard the garbage train, broke billionaire farms, and more

Lobbyist Watch is City Hall Watcher’s monthly summary of activity on Toronto City Hall’s Lobbyist Registry. In September 2026, City Hall Watcher reviewed 265 registered lobbyist communications and 50 new subject matter registrations.

Disclaimer: Toronto’s Lobbyist Registry requires lobbyists to register and record all communications they have with politicians and staff, but it does not require them to provide much detail about the extent of those communications. As a result, a meeting noted below could be a long conversation with some deal-making or a passing chat of no real consequence. The data presented below is current as of October 5, 2026.

Trash train

CN Rail has registered to talk to City Hall about garbage transit. But not in the way people usually talk to City Hall about garbage transit. In this case, CN wants to extol the virtues of shipping trash out of Toronto by rail.

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ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES:

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ Browse Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 📽️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection

• 📊 Search the Council Scorecard

No turning back now. There are 28 days left until Election Day.

City Hall Watcher, as always, has you covered. This week, in response to a lot of vague gesturing to…

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ELECTION 2026 RESOURCES:

• 👟 Find your match on Council with SimCouncillor

• ⛳️ View Council’s Lobbying Report Cards

• 🗳️ View City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection

Happy Monday. There are 35 days left until election day.

While we wait, City Hall Watcher has yet another bit of nerdy data analysis for you. Did you ever wonder which councillors speak the most…

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👟 If you haven’t played SimCouncillor yet, try it out — and find your match on Toronto Council.

Hey there! Back to the usual this week after last week’s milestone issue party. Though Issue #401 comes with a pretty notable number, too. Maybe we should bury it. Even if it costs $100 billion, let’s put this issue in a tunnel.

But anyway, in addition to jok…

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I know I say this at every milestone, but it really is just so enormously cool that this little indie newsletter has been able to survive and grow and thrive like it has. Thank you for reading and supporting this work.

You wouldn’t necessarily think there’d be such a strong market for a hyper-obsessed municipal government newsletter that routinely runs thousands of words each week, but then I suppose we’re all mad here.

Speaking of mad:

Thanks to Joy San for contributing the cover art for this milestone issue. It’s definitely the most surreal cover yet, and I love it for that. Where else are you going to see mayoral candidates playing croquet, using a squirrel for a ball and geese for mallets, overseen by a deranged Cheshire raccoon that bears a striking resemblance to someone?

You can check out more of Joy’s work and commission your own art on her website.

This issue isn’t just big because it happens to be a round-number issue. It’s also big because there’s a lot packed into it. I’ve got a new edition of LOBBYIST WATCH and the launch of a new regular feature covering the latest from the 25 ward races.

But before that, there’s the big headline: the launch of a brand new interactive feature that, I hope, will help you figure out how much you align with your local councillor. I’m calling it SimCouncillor.

Let’s check it out.

✨ This issue runs a bit long. If it gets cut off in your email client, read it on the web.

— Matt Elliott

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Introducing SimCouncillor: Tell us how you’d have voted — and find your match

Play SimCouncillor

Over the last three years, I’ve collected the results from over 100 important Council votes taken by Mayor Olivia Chow and Council and fed them to the COUNCIL SCORECARD. The Scorecard allows for all kinds of useful analysis about how councillors operate: their ideological disposition, their loyalty to the mayor and any and all shifts in perspective over time.

All this data is also useful, it turns out, in the context of a municipal election.

Launching today, SimCouncillor puts you right in the fancy shoes of your local councillor. You’ll be presented with 15 real votes and asked how you’d vote. Just like in the real Council Chamber, there’s no way to abstain. On some issues, you’ll have to consider whether it makes sense to compromise, or whether you’d like to stay rigid and hold out for a better outcome. Some issues will seem hyperlocal, and maybe require you to do a bit of research. (Like, does anyone really remember what that dispute over the Humber Yacht Club was actually about?)

You don’t have to stand up and give a five-minute speech explaining how you’d vote, but you can, if you’d like. Your cat, or your kid, or your coworkers, might like it.

After running through a set of 15 questions — and maybe a few tiebreakers — SimCouncillor will tell you a few things:

• How your views compare with the two members of Council running for mayor: Mayor Olivia Chow and Councillor Brad Bradford.

• How your views compare to your local councillor.

• Who your closest match on Council is.

It only takes a minute or two, so try it out. Choose some priority categories if you care more about some issues — you’ll be guaranteed to get more of those kinds of questions in your random set, and scoring for those issues will count more.

You can take a quick screenshot to share your results with friends. They’ll probably be like, “Wow, a municipal politics game? I’m cancelling my GTA 6 preorder! This is all the fun I need!”

I mean, maybe. It’s plausible.

Results are 100% anonymous. I can’t trace them back to you, even if I wanted to — and I don’t! But I will be regularly reporting on how many people match with each member of Council, though. I’m curious to see if anyone else in the world could possibly have the exact same views of some councillors. It’ll be a fun experiment.

Try it out and let me know if you have any feedback or notice any bugs.

Special thanks to Andrey Levkovski for his help vetting the questions and testing the app.

Pretty cool, right? If you like this kind of thing and want to support more independent journalism, consider becoming a City Hall Watcher subscriber. It costs just six bucks a month or sixty bucks a year, plus HST.

Subscribe now

Lobbyist Watch for August 2026: Waymo rolls on, Oracle sees an opening, and more

Lobbyist Watch is City Hall Watcher’s monthly summary of activity on Toronto City Hall’s Lobbyist Registry. In August 2026, City Hall Watcher reviewed 258 registered lobbyist communications and 74 new subject matter registrations.

Disclaimer: Toronto’s Lobbyist Registry requires lobbyists to register and record all communications they have with politicians and staff, but it does not require them to provide much detail about the extent of those communications. As a result, a meeting noted below could be a long conversation with some deal-making or a passing chat of no real consequence. The data presented below is current as of September 4, 2026.

A bit more Waymo

Robotaxi service Waymo continues to try to steer its way to establishing service in Toronto. On August 12, the company — a subsidiary of Google — sent Head of International Policy & Government Affairs George Ivanov and Head of Public Policy for Canada Caitlin McClung to meet with Adam Chaleff, the mayor’s Director of Legislative Affairs & Issues Management. The trio met on August 12.

McClung appears to be a new addition to the self-driving effort. She previously worked as a public affairs director for Restaurant Brands International. She was also a director at StrategyCorp and worked for the provincial government in the Dalton McGuinty era.

McClung’s registration tells us her job is to talk up “the potential development of by-laws and regulations related to autonomous driving technologies, including as it relates to operational authorizations, commercial operations, goods delivery operations and ridehail operations.”

Sabrina Geremia, a longtime Googler who currently serves as VP & Country Managing Director for Canada, is listed as the Senior Officer on the file.

In addition to the McClung and Ivanov meeting with Chaleff, Waymo also continues to employ the services of StrategyCorp’s Aidan Grove-White. Grove-White met with staff from Transportation Services on August 10.

Ask the Oracle

Senior staff from City Hall’s Technology Services division heard much from the Oracle in August. Reps from Oracle America, the tech company founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, logged 20 communications to City staff.

The company is pitching their products and services, including “cloud applications, platform services and engineered systems.” A contingent of staffers met with a large Oracle contingent on August 13. The meeting was followed by an email to Deputy City Manager for Corporate Services Sonia Brar on August 23.

The meetings, of course, come in the midst of an escalating trade war with the United States. Ellison has been a staunch supporter of the current U.S. administration.

Lobbying grab bag

• Reps for engineering firm AECOM logged a big meeting with senior staff from Toronto Water on August 27. The company has a long history helping the City upgrade wastewater facilities and other water-related infrastructure.

• SmartCentres seemingly has some issues with the signage at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre subway station. Maybe it’s because the name is ridiculously long and probably pretty hard to fit on a lot of signs? Anyway, Grant Gonzales, Director of Corporate Affairs for SmartCentres REIT, logged a meeting with senior staff at the TTC on August 25 to discuss the matter. The meeting included reps from the transit agency’s Wayfinding & Signage department and the Marketing department.

• Raly Chakarova, Executive Director of the Toronto and Area Road Builders Association, logged a meeting with Chief Procurement Officer Geneviève Sharkey on August 12.

• Dr. Kenneth Chan, a partner with professional services firm Optimus SBR, logged meetings with Councillor Chris Moise, Councillor Rachel Chernos Lin, Councillor Josh Matlow and Medical Officer of Health Michelle Murti on August 18. Chan is part of an effort to pitch City Hall on Optimus’ services. They’d probably describe them as prime.

• Representing restaurant group Pegasus, lobbyist Kim Wright logged a meeting with senior staff from City Planning and Corporate Real Estate Management on August 28. The company’s portfolio includes The Wheat Sheaf, O’Grady’s, Palais Royale, Figo and more.

• Lyft Canada’s Public Policy Manager Amanda Arella logged meetings with Craig Ruttan, chief of staff to Councillor Brad Bradford, and Adam Chaleff, senior staffer to the mayor, on August 4. Stefano Hollands from Crestview Strategy logged the same meetings as part of the lobbying firm’s work with Lyft.

Tech 4 sale

• Ouster Canada, makers of tech that uses LIDAR sensors to optimize traffic signal timing, has registered to pitch their tech to City Hall. No communications yet.

• Global Public Affairs’ Ellen Chin was keeping busy representing eStruxture Data Centers as the company continues to look for opportunities to convince City Hall of the virtues of data centres. She logged several phone calls and emails to staff with Toronto Building, City Planning, Development Review and the Environment division. On August 12, she logged a meeting with Environment, Climate & Forestry Executive Director James Nowlan.

• The City continues to see vendor presentations from cybersecurity companies. In August, they heard from Cybersnap, Beauceron Security, Hoxhunt, Kyndryl and others.

• Code 4 Canada CEO Dorothy Eng and Director of Partnerships Andrew Lui logged meetings with staff from Transportation Services and Technology Services, hoping to discuss the City’s “digital capacity to design, develop and deliver user-centric public services that meet people's needs.”

Familiar faces

• Kema Joseph, a former advisor to John Tory, is representing the Coalition of Innovation Leaders Advancing Respect. These CILARs are looking to gain City support for things like “inclusive AI and digital-skills training, mentorship, career pathways and entrepreneurship opportunities.” Joseph met with current mayoral advisor Adam Chaleff on September 2.

• Amir Remtulla, long ago the chief of staff to former mayor Rob Ford, is representing beer giant Molson Coors. The company has some concerns about the City’s sewer surcharge.

Toronto’s top lobbying charts for August 2026

Most Lobbied Officials: Adam Chaleff, Mayor’s Office (9 communications); Sebastien Gibson, Councillor Matlow’s Office (4); Nika Lennox, Councillor Matlow’s Office (4); Councillor Lily Cheng (4); Craig Ruttan, Councillor Bradford’s Office (4)

Lobbyist Watch will return in October.

Candidate Chaos: Labour Day labour endorsements, Nunziata and Padovani get into a heated rivalry, John Tory lurks

The mayoral race gets all the attention, but there are also 25 separate contests for Council seats happening. Here are some tidbits from the CANDIDATE CHAOS of the last week.

A TORY STORY: It’s not clear yet how much of an active role former mayor John Tory will play in this fall’s elections, but a pair of sitting councillors are claiming his endorsement. Both Councillor Mike Colle and Councillor Frances Nunziata have posts saying they’ve got the backing of the longtime mayor.

LABOUR OF LOVE: Candidates were out in force at the Labour Day parade yesterday, expressing their appreciation for unions. But the love isn’t necessarily 100% mutual in all cases. Both CUPE Local 79 and the Toronto & York Region Labour Council have come out with slates of endorsements. CUPE 416 has so far endorsed just one candidate: Beaches-East York’s Natalie Johnson.

Here’s where things stand:

ALSO ENDORSED: Colle also has the support of MP Marco Mendicino, while Nunziata is counting the support of MP (and former councillor) Jennifer McKelvie. Diana Yoon scored a notable endorsement in University-Rosedale, getting the backing of former MPP Suze Morrison. Councillor Chris Moise, meanwhile, earned kudos — and an endorsement — from former Medical Officer of Health and noted scarf aficionado Eileen de Villa.

In Scarborough North, challenger Han Dong is touting the support of CK Fung, husband of the late former councillor Cynthia Lai. And it seems notable that Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman is guesting at a fundraising event for Willowdale challenger Ardeshir Zarazade.

TURNING UP THE HEAT: In York South — Weston, challenger Chiara Padovani and Councillor Frances Nunziata have developed something of a heated rivalry over the idea of a max temperature bylaw.

Padovani posted a video with a lot of hot-weather effects and footage of people fanning themselves, claiming Nunziata “recently voted to kick the can down the road, pushing a decision on a Maximum Heat Bylaw to next summer.”

Nunziata fired back, saying “some people either can’t read or are disingenuous with the facts.”

“To be clear,” she wrote, “I voted with Mayor Olivia Chow and 21 other members of Council to move forward with a maximum indoor temperature by-law and to bring it back for approval by June 2027.”

But what do the facts say? Well, as is often the case with this stuff, it’s a bit complicated. There have been a lot of votes on the question of a maximum temperature bylaw over the years. Nunziata has generally been supportive of the idea. This dispute centres on a vote from May 2026, in which Councillor Josh Matlow moved to accelerate the development of a bylaw so that it’d be ready for June 2026.

Several councillors, including members of the mayor’s Executive Committee like Councillor Alejandra Bravo and Councillor Gord Perks, argued at the time that this was not a realistic timeline. The Matlow motion was defeated 8-16, with Nunziata on the opposing side. (Notably, both Mayor Olivia Chow and Councillor Brad Bradford supported the accelerated timeline motion.)

So Padovani is right to point out that Nunziata was opposed to a motion to speed up implementation of a maximum temperature bylaw, but with the caveat that Nunziata was far from alone in believing that the motion was not realistic.

Nunziata can instead point to her support of another motion moved and passed by Bravo at the same meeting, calling for the development of a “framework” for a maximum temperature bylaw. That motion led to a subsequent debate at the June Council meeting in which Council voted 23-1, with Nunziata joining the majority, in favour of developing a bylaw for June 2027.

BRIEFLY:

• Toronto Centre candidate Curren Stikuts is pledging to expand the operating hours at Riverdale Farm.

• Former councillor Mike Layton is making me jealous with his cool cargo bike.

• Both Councillor Jamaal Myers and challenger Han Dong ended up at the opening of the Toronto Zoo’s new glow-in-the-dark exhibit. Looks pretty trippy.

• Councillor Josh Matlow shared a post pointing out that the torrential rain last week didn’t seem to cause the roof to cave in at the Ontario Science Centre. Go figure.

• Scarborough Centre candidate Krissan Veerasingam raised some money by hosting a food tour.

• In Etobicoke North, challenger Chloe Brown has signed something called the Community-Led Planning Champion Pledge. “I believe in a holistic approach to development that empowers our youth, supports local businesses, and meets the needs of working-class families,” she says. The pledge is a project of the Coalition for Responsible Community Development. Thirty-three other candidates have signed so far.

News briefs are compiled primarily from Instagram posts. If you’re a candidate and haven’t been followed by the official City Hall Watcher account, get in touch, and we’ll add you.

The week at Toronto City Hall

THURSDAY: 🎭 The TO Live Board meets on Thursday to discuss the City’s theatres. An update from the Corporate Real Estate Management division reveals that two options for fixing up the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts will be presented in January. Option One will be a more bare-bones $84 million reno. Option Two will include “enhanced upgrades” but will require additional philanthropic and federal government funding.

NEXT WEEK: A special Council meeting scheduled for September 16 was cancelled. Dry your tears. It’s going to be okay.

Weekly wrap

📽️ ELECTION PROJECTION: City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection remains unchanged as we wait for new polling.

But here’s something new: School boards are now tracked in our election dashboard! You can see each trustee election, including where incumbents are running, as well as the wards that have already been decided by acclamation. View the full projection by Alex Olson.

📊 CouncilScorecard.ca ACCESS CODE: Subscribe to get access

🗳️ CANDID CANDIDATES: The 2026 Election Candidate Tracker remains available. I’ve added a section at the bottom listing registered third-party advertisers. As of today, there are four registered: ABC Advertising Company, More Neighbours Toronto, R. Michael Teper, and United Steelworkers USW.

🪧 SIGNS OF THE TIMES: 875 QUEEN ST E: Firehouse Subs; 3278 MIDLAND AVE: Molly Tea; 5 GRENOBLE DR: Flemmingdon Park Community Church; 0 BOROUGH DR: Alta at STC; 55 BLOOR ST W: Spier & Mackay; 801 BAY ST: Infinity Vape; 101 STOKES ST: Camh; 250A QUEENS QUAY W: Rabba Fine Foods; 3478 LAWRENCE AVE E: Angara Indian & Hakka Cuisine; 44 FASKEN DR: Budget Shelves; 0 SHAW ST: Camh; 5845-5955 LESLIE ST: Tim Horton; 150 SILVER REIGN DR: Poulet Rouge; 1050 MILITARY TRL: University Of Toronto; 2280 DUNDAS ST W: Shoppers Drug Mart; 1245 DUPONT ST: Pet Valu; 1142 CASTLEFIELD AVE: Bloomsbury Fine Cabinetry; 20 WELLINGTON ST E: Axis Therapy & Performance; 1780 MARKHAM RD: Punjabi Haveli; 1350-1400 CASTLEFIELD AVE: Fit 4 Less; 100 CONSILIUM PL: Hitachi; 5 EIREANN QUAY: Corleck; 365 PARLIAMENT ST: Bmo; 8450 SHEPPARD AVE E: Rouge Valley Community Recreation Centre; 45 EAST LIBERTY ST: Tim Hortons; 23 SPADINA AVE: Concord City Place Way; 70 CALEDONIA PARK RD: Nest; 200 WILMINGTON AVE: Honey & Barry Sherman Campus; 3250 MARKHAM RD: Marquee; 900 DUFFERIN ST: Canadian Blood Service. (Sign Permit Applications since August 31, 2026)

City Hall Watcher #400

Thanks for reading! That’s four hundred issues done and dusted. Next week: our highway series continues with Issue 401. But don’t worry: after much consideration, I have decided NOT to sell Issue 407 to an international conglomerate of investors.

If you liked this issue — and the 399 that came before it — tell a pal.

But there’s still reason to get excited. In this issue, Andrey’s got answers to a question I’ve seen a few people ask over the last few months: what, exactly, did Mayor Olivia Chow’s property tax increases over the last three years pay for?

It turns out a big chunk of the money went to policing. We’ve got a look at whether that’s been effective spending, and whether it’s sustainable. Two important questions to think about during this election year.

Also: notes on robot permit-checkers, the local side of the U.S.-Canada trade war, and the current state of the mayoral race.

Let’s get into it.

— Andrey Levkovski & Matt Elliott

andrey@cityhallwatcher.com / matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Olivia Chow’s property-tax hikes helped pay for a major expansion in police spending

By Andrey Levkovski

Olivia Chow’s property-tax increases paid for a whole lot of policing.

Across Mayor Olivia Chow’s 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets, Toronto’s annual general municipal property-tax levy grew from $5.142 billion in 2023 to $6.174 billion in 2026, an increase of $1.033 billion. Residential property-tax bills rose 9.5% in 2024, 6.9% in 2025 and 2.2% in 2026.

Over the same period, the Toronto Police Service’s net operating budget grew by $266.3 million, from $1.16 billion in 2023 to $1.43 billion in 2026.

Dividing the $266.3-million police increase by the $1.033-billion levy increase produces 25.8%, close to $1 for every $4. City Hall pools property-tax revenue with other income. The result is a scale comparison between the two annual changes. (Council records the City Building Fund separately. That dedicated levy for transit and housing capital projects consistently adds 1.5% to the budgeted residential property tax increase each year.)

Where Chow spent her tax increases

The police received the largest operating budget increase among the three major services examined: policing, housing, and transit. The City’s combined housing net budget grew from $420.1 million in 2023 to $597.8 million in 2026, an increase of $177.7 million. The TTC’s net budget rose from $1.3256 billion to $1.4806 billion, producing an increase of $155 million.

The police increase was therefore $88.6 million larger than housing’s and $111.4 million larger than the TTC’s. The housing figures combine the programs brought together in the City’s reorganized 2026 housing office, while the TTC figures include conventional transit and Wheel-Trans.

All three services received substantial increases, with police getting the largest.

Sean Meagher, executive director of The Change Lab and a longtime Toronto police budget analyst, said public safety had staunch support from residents and many councillors. Chow’s budgets reflected that democratic pressure, he said.

The extra police money largely bought people and compensation. TPS told CHW that negotiated salary increases, their annualization, inflation and employee benefits drove much of the growth. The 2026 police budget included a $50.7-million collective agreement impact and $20.5 million for 143 net new uniform officers. The City approved 212 additional police positions that year.

Meagher also pointed to money secured beyond the property-tax base. The Ontario-Toronto New Deal provided up to $1.2 billion in provincial operating support and transit funding. A federal partnership announced this month offered Toronto about $2.7 billion in housing grants and low-cost financing.

Capital budget documents reinforce Meagher’s point. The police’s rolling 10-year capital plan rose from $726 million in 2023 to $1.296 billion in 2026, an increase of $569.7 million. Both totals include carry-forward funding. Over the same budgets, the TTC plan grew from $12.491 billion to $16.657 billion — an increase of $4.166 billion. The City’s current capital plan also directs $5.183 billion to housing, supplemented by $3.577 billion in foregone revenues.

Police response times improved as budgets rose

On the operating side, police received a substantial increase across Toronto’s 2024, 2025 and 2026 budgets. One measure of police performance is how quickly officers responded to the most urgent calls.

Average Priority 1 response time fell from 23.1 minutes in 2023 to 17.1 minutes in 2024 and then to 14.1 minutes in 2025. Those results cover Chow’s first two budgets. TPS credits increased staffing, targeted deployment and operational changes. Its 2025 annual report also points to Next Generation 911, automatic text replies for disconnected calls and better queue management. In reality, total calls for service fell by 205,761, or 11%, in 2025.

At the same time, the 2023 police budget funded 336 hires, including 200 uniform officers and 20 communications operators. The 2026 police budget says the current expansion builds on hiring that began in 2022. The chronology shows response times improving during a period of rising budgets and overlapping operational changes. The earlier hiring likely contributed to the response-time improvement alongside Chow-era staffing increases, deployment changes, new 911 technology and falling call volume.

Several changes arrived together, making the improvement a shared result.

Meagher says the lasting test is whether Toronto keeps shifting suitable calls to services with the training to handle them.

“You can’t fill a bucket with no bottom,” he said. As police expand into work beyond their core role, he argues, added officers can be consumed by added tasks. Dispatch changes, new 911 technology and call diversion all helped bring response times down alongside hiring.

Civilian services can take work off the police

Toronto already has one major service helping to divert calls away from police. The Toronto Community Crisis Service sends civilian teams to people experiencing mental-health crises and gives 911 dispatchers another response option.

In 2025, TCCS received 4,482 eligible 911 transfers and resolved 76.7% without police involvement. The City projects annual diversions from 911 rising from about 5,300 in 2026 to more than 10,000 by 2031. Meagher sees the same potential in TTC Community Safety Ambassadors, youth outreach workers and stronger mental-health supports. Each program can reserve officer time for emergencies and investigations.

“You can free up more police officers by removing them from non-police work than by just spending more,” he said.

The TCCS, however, is a significant additional expense for the City, and police spending has continued to grow even as civilian teams take on thousands of calls, leaving no corresponding reduction in the police budget.

Police spending is set to keep rising

The current outlook keeps police spending rising through Chow’s hiring plan. The official figures put net spending at $1.564 billion in 2027, about $131 million above 2026, followed by a further $101.8-million increase in 2028. The hiring plan adds 87 net new officers and 29 civilian professionals in 2027, then 50 officers and 17 civilians in 2028.

As CHW previously covered, mayoral candidate Councillor Brad Bradford has proposed going further by hiring 1,000 new officers during his first term. Using TPS’s 2026 budgeted rate of $20.5 million for 143 net new officers, CHW estimated that 1,000 net new officers would cost about $143.4 million. Bradford has yet to explain how he would fund the plan.

With Chow’s hiring plan continuing and Bradford proposing an even larger expansion, police spending is likely to remain a major pressure on Toronto’s future budgets. Chow is likely to keep facing criticism for the property-tax increases approved during her tenure. The budget record makes policing’s place in that debate clear: for every additional dollar in Toronto’s annual general municipal levy, the police budget grew by about 25 cents.

In other news

By Andrey Levkovski

ROBOT, CHECK MY PERMIT: The City launched a new AI-powered tool on Thursday that checks building permit applications before they are formally submitted. The Building Permit Application Pre-Check scans eligible applications for missing or incomplete information, inconsistencies, and some zoning and Ontario Building Code issues, then produces a report applicants can use to fix problems before City staff begin their review. More than one in five Toronto building permit applications arrive without basic required paperwork, according to TorontoToday. The City says the pilot is intended to cut down on avoidable resubmissions and speed up first reviews.

TARIFF WARS, TORONTO EDITION: The renewed Canada-U.S. trade fight is becoming a Toronto mayoral campaign issue. Mayor Olivia Chow spent Thursday highlighting the City’s existing business-support programs, including the EDGE tax incentive. Its first recipient, National Dry Beverages, is spending more than $18 million expanding its North York plant and says it will add 20 jobs. Councillor Brad Bradford is promising a 25-per-cent property tax cut for roughly 3,500 industrial businesses while the trade dispute continues. The proposal was previously estimated to cost about $30 million annually. Neither candidate presented entirely new ideas, notes Toronto Today’s Aidan Chamandy. Chris Alexander, meanwhile, is pitching a two-year commercial property tax grant for qualifying new businesses, along with loan guarantees and lower licensing fees.

A MASS OF CYCLISTS: Hundreds of cyclists filled Toronto streets Friday evening for a large Critical Mass ride organized amid renewed fights over bike lanes. Mayor Olivia Chow joined the gathering and spoke before riders travelled along Danforth Avenue, past mayoral rival Brad Bradford’s constituency office and toward Queen’s Park. Estimates from participants put attendance somewhere from roughly 700 to more than 1,000. The ride came two weeks after the Ontario Court of Appeal cleared the way for the province’s planned removal of protected lanes on Bloor, Yonge and University, and after Bradford promised to remove the Bloor West lanes in Etobicoke if elected mayor.

THE RACE AT THE END OF AUGUST: A new Pallas Data poll has Chow at 38% among all voters, Bradford at 30% and Alexander at six percent, with 24% undecided. Among decided and leaning voters, Chow leads Bradford 50 to 39. The poll surveyed 808 Toronto voters from August 19 to 21. There’s an interesting wrinkle beneath the horse-race numbers: 48% said they were dissatisfied with Chow’s performance, compared with 37% who approved. Pallas CEO Joseph Angolano argues⁠ Bradford has yet to convince dissatisfied voters that he is a credible replacement.

The poll has been added to City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection site.

More from Matt: on team building, and trash bins

📰 For the Toronto Star last week, I wrote about the work Mayor Olivia Chow has been doing to build a team for a potential second term. Her focus on team-building seems to stand in pretty stark contrast to Councillor Brad Bradford’s lone wolf approach. If he did win, who would be on Team Bradford?

🗞️ For the Star this week, I tackle a question I’ve been seeing a lot lately: what’s this election actually about? Maybe, I argue, it should be about garbage bins. They’re more important than you think.

Look for it in your favourite newspaper.

The week at Toronto City Hall

THURSDAY: 🦧 The Zoo Board meets. They’ll hear some not-so-great news about attendance. Visits in July were way below budget. The month stands as “the fourth lowest July attendance in the Zoo’s 52-year history (including years affected by the COVID-19 pandemic).” Not ideal! The report blames the hot weather and wildfire smoke for making people think twice about spending a day outdoors looking at animals.

NEXT WEEK: More signs of life! The Preservation Board meets Wednesday. The TO Live Board meets on Thursday.

Weekly wrap

📽️ ELECTION PROJECTION: City Hall Watcher’s Election Projection currently gives Mayor Olivia Chow about an 80% chance of winning re-election. View the full projection by Alex Olson.

Recent additions include a very cool visualization of the most likely outcomes: Is the mayoral race going to be a nail-biter or a landslide? The data offers clues.

📊 CouncilScorecard.ca ACCESS CODE: Subscribe to get access.

🗳️ CANDID CANDIDATES: The 2026 Election Candidate Tracker remains available.

🪧 SIGNS OF THE TIMES: 1005 KING ST W: Tim Hortons; 60 SCOTTFIELD DR: Yee Hong Hospice; 1182 KING ST W: Fs8; 64 BATHURST ST: Equinox; 2876 DUNDAS ST W: Mcdonalds; 117 BLOOR ST E: St. Andrews United Church; 30 MUTUAL ST: Ac Hotels; 42 DUFFLAW RD: Toronto Foundation For Student Success; 1080-1082 ST CLAIR AVE W: Mizzica; 3250 MIDLAND AVE: Molly Tea; 1780 MARKHAM RD: Punjabi Haveli; 794 GERRARD ST E: Anytime Fitness; 1 OAK ST: 1Oak Dental; 294 EGLINTON AVE W: Crock A Doodle; 2304 SHEPPARD AVE W: Tim Hortons; 709 QUEEN ST E: McDonalds; 0 REXDALE BLVD: Big Chicken; 1849 YONGE ST: Davisville Medical Dental Centre; 26 LEE CENTRE DR: Shonan Sandwich & Sweet; 438 NUGGET AVE: Burger King; 801 BAY ST: Infinity Mart; 2299 YONGE ST: Poulet Rouge; 1289-1411 LAWRENCE AVE W: Metro; 260 YONGE ST: Simons; 356 HURON ST: Tianjin Auntie’s Bun Restaurant; 0 GIBBS RD: West Square; 333 BAY ST: Shinji; 2197 BLOOR ST W: 850 Degrees Pizzeria; 1090 DON MILLS RD: Crock A Doodle; 1090 DON MILLS RD: The Golden Hive. (Sign Permit Applications since August 24, 2026)

City Hall Watcher #399

Thanks for reading! Next week: a milestone! We’ll mark 400 issues with a wild party and also a summary of lobbying activity from August. It’ll also finally be time to debut SIMCOUNCILLOR.

This marks Andrey’s last issue of City Hall Watcher, as he wraps up his work placement. Thanks to him for all his contributions. It’s been a bunch of nerdy fun.

See you next week! Because of the holiday, the issue will hit your inbox on Tuesday.

There are no take-backs. Candidates can suspend their campaigns between now and October 26, but their names will remain on the ballot regardless. The field is locked.

So, uh, who’s going to win? Since City Hall Watcher’s attempt to develop a time machine is still stuck in a prolonged community consultation phase — some residents have requested additional temporal traffic studies — we can’t say for certain. But we can offer you the next best thing: a projection.

Today, City Hall Watcher is launching its first-ever official Election Projection. In collaboration with Alex Olson, Director of UofT’s Centre for Analytics & AI Engineering, the project will live at projection.cityhallwatcher.com.

View the Election Projection

The projection site includes:

• Current odds for the mayoral race for the three major candidates: Mayor Olivia Chow, Councillor Brad Bradford, and Chris Alexander.

• A collection of all public polls

• An overview of all 25 Council races, with a selection of races to watch based on a whole bunch of factors.

Read on for Alex’s more detailed introduction to the projection project and various nerdy details.

Also in this edition of City Hall Watcher: your final Council Scorecard update of the term, with some housing data updates, and a look at all the last-minute drama in the mayoral race. Surprise retirements! Ward switcheraroos! It was a weird week.

Let’s get into it.

— Matt Elliott & Andrey Levkovski

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / andrey@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Building an election projection project

By Alex Olson

When it comes to predictive modelling, there’s a standard rule-of-thumb that the best model is as simple as you can make it without sacrificing capability. For Toronto elections, that means there’s almost no reason to stretch our model past “if there is an incumbent, they will win” — that alone nets you an accuracy rate that would make Nate Silver jealous (94%, in case you’re wondering).

Despite this, and perhaps motivated slightly by the fact that many wards seem to contain multiple candidates I’d call “incumbent-shaped”, I’ve been interested to see what useful information we can surface to help you follow this election.

For the Mayoral race, this is reasonably straightforward. There is a decent record of polling since amalgamation1, which means we can build a model and test if it works historically. My approach draws potential outcomes from a statistical distribution centred on a balanced average of polls, with the range of that distribution calibrated against the accuracy of past Toronto polling. We then draw thousands of outcomes and aggregate to see how often each candidate wins.

I still want to make sure that the model is worth something, though. To do that, I set a series of tests that my approach must meet before we show it anywhere. They fall into two categories. First, does the model beat just looking at the last poll before the election? And second, does it make approximately the same predictions even if we jimmy things around a bit? For the mayoral election, the answer is yes! What we’re showing you does a better job than the polls alone, and it’s sufficiently stable.

Council races are a different story. There are next to no polls done at the ward level, and where they do exist, they’re few and far between. This means we can’t tell you who will win2. However, there’s still useful information out there. In particular, I looked at past election performance across all tiers of government in Toronto – from school board to federal — to identify signals that rise above noise. This is presented alongside Matt’s own Councillor Defeatability Index, as well as what little polling does exist.

In all, I hope the Election Projection gives you the ability to better understand which races are being meaningfully contested, even if we can’t tell you who is most likely to win.

During the election period, I’ll be updating the model periodically and providing quick updates on changes as we see them. I hope you find the site useful — reach out if you have questions.

➡️ View the 2026 Election Projection

Council Scorecard Update: checking the final score for the 2026 term

By Matt Elliott

The Council Scorecard is my ongoing tracker of how often members of Council vote with the mayor on significant items.

Now with its very own fancy-pants web app, I add votes I deem significant after every Council meeting. Votes are considered significant if they’ve attracted a lot of public interest or are particularly indicative of a major ideological or political split amongst members of Council.

As a City Hall Watcher subscriber, you can access the Scorecard at CouncilScorecard.ca, with this brand new passphrase:

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Find out where your councillor ranks. Each entry combines data about council att…

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We’ve also got notes on the people meeting with the traffic cza…

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Council capped off the 2022-2026 term last week, completing their monster of a July meeting agenda in just two days. It had the potential to be a real mega-disaster of a meeting, but councillors — eager to close the book on this term and put their focus on the election — were relatively well-behaved and generally in agree…

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Because it’s summer, this week I am kicking back and letting some others do the work. Damien Moule has taken a look at Toronto’s famously slow streetcar system and why several supposed “silver bullet” fixes have generally missed the target. If you’ve ever wanted to get deep into the weeds of what “transit signal priority” actually means, this is the newsletter for you.

City Hall Watcher is also welcoming its first-ever reporting contributor this week. Andrey Levkovski will be hanging around City Hall and contributing material to CHW for the rest of the summer. If you need to get in touch, you can email him at andrey@cityhallwatcher.com.

To celebrate this week’s non-Matt contributions, this issue of City Hall Watcher is being sent free to all subscribers. If you dig it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get access to this kind of content each and every week, plus the interactive COUNCIL SCORECARD. It supports independent journalism and costs just six bucks a month or $60 a year, plus HST — a bargain and a deal.

✨ This issue runs a bit long. If it gets cut off in your email client, read it on the web.

— Matt Elliott

matt@cityhallwatcher.com / Archives / Subscribe

Toronto’s slow streetcars need more than a quick fix

By Damien Moule

When the Finch LRT opened back in December, there was an outcry about how slow it was1. And not just in niche transit circles. It made the papers. It made the evening TV news. People raced the transit vehicles on foot — and won.

Politicians sprang into action. TTC chair Jamaal Myers introduced a motion at December’s TTC Board meeting to look at improving signal priority and frequency, and to review TTC operating practices for the line to look for ways to speed up the LRT. Days later, at a City Council meeting, Mayor Olivia Chow introduced a motion asking the TTC to improve transit signal priority along the line.

By April, the TTC’s data showed a ten-minute time saving per direction, and by June, another five-minute saving. The $3.7 billion Finch LRT started moving faster than the bus it replaced. There was much rejoicing.

The initial slow speeds of the Finch LRT naturally raised comparisons to the sluggish streetcar network. And so, along with the motions to improve the Finch LRT came requests to investigate how to speed up the streetcars. In the same April report measuring improved speeds on the Finch LRT came a plan from the TTC to begin improving streetcar speeds. This came hot on the heels of the July 2025 approval of the painted Bathurst streetcar lanes that were rolled out ahead of the World Cup, and the December 2025 approval of parking and turning restrictions to speed up the Dundas streetcar.

Now, for those of us who live along a streetcar line, these have been frankly unexpected developments. The streetcars, while iconic, are notoriously the slowest and least reliable part of the TTC, and elected officials have long seemed perfectly happy to leave it that way. Past attempts at improvements, such as the King Street transit priority corridor, have been undermined by spotty enforcement, construction diversions, and frequency cuts.

You might expect that the streetcars finally receiving some focused attention from the TTC Board and City Council would make me happy. But you would be wrong. Instead, the last year has left me exasperated.

The streetcars are slow… like really slow

Before getting to my complaints let’s do some table setting. Toronto’s streetcars are slow. I know I’m not breaking any news by saying that. For as long as I can remember people have been making the joke that it’s usually faster to walk than take the streetcar. But I want to make sure you read that sentence with the right emphasis. It’s not that streetcars are slow. It’s that Toronto’s streetcars are slow.

Jan Scheurer, a professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, evaluated the speeds of 16 different streetcar2 systems across multiple years and found that Toronto’s streetcars in 2024 were the slowest of any system in any year reviewed. And not just a little slower. A lot slower.

The TTC has also compared streetcar speeds to those from five other international cities and found the same thing.

Now I am not willing to go so far as to say the Toronto streetcars are definitively the slowest in the world3, but I think it’s clear that Toronto’s streetcar network is one of the slowest major streetcar systems in the world. And it’s also clear that the difference in speeds between the fastest and slowest streetcar networks is quite large.

The never-ending search for silver bullets

Stop me if you’ve heard this before4. The streetcars would be fixed if we just put them in their own lanes. The streetcars would be fixed if we just gave them signal priority. The streetcars would be fixed if we just used wider stop spacing. The streetcar routes would be fixed if we just replaced them with buses.

This search for the one trick that will fix the streetcars has been going on for as long as I can remember. The idea that all a streetcar needs to be good is its own lane has been around since at least the 90s when the Harbourfront Streetcar, and later the Spadina and St. Clair streetcars, were given their own separated lanes. It carried on through Transit City, and Metrolinx seemed to be relying on the same thinking for both the Finch LRT and the above-ground sections of the Eglinton Crosstown. And it was still lurking around in 2025 when Council voted to give the Bathurst streetcar its own lane.

Why is this a problem? Aren’t transit lanes good? Well, they can be good. And they usually are OK, or at least better than nothing. But the search for silver bullets leads to a really bad habit of focusing on the buzzword and not the quality of the improvement. The focus becomes “is the proposal a dedicated streetcar lane?”, and not “will the proposed streetcar lane, you know, work”?

Let’s take the Bathurst painted streetcar lane as an example.

There are multiple ways streetcars get slowed down by cars. Let’s focus on a few of them. Streetcars can be stuck behind a car waiting to make a left-hand turn. They can be forced to slow down while a car turns across or goes straight across its path or does a three-point turn. They can be forced to wait while a car is pulling into an on-street parking spot in the right-hand lane or stopped for a quick drop off (sometimes called curb friction).

A dedicated streetcar lane can tackle all of these problems. But the Bathurst lane did not5. By my count, the design of the transit lanes only blocks left-hand turns from delaying the streetcar at 6 of the 236 intersections along the route, and only half of those were new restrictions. Everywhere else, cars are either still allowed to enter the transit lane directly to make a left turn, or get a dedicated turn lane and signal, which also slows down the streetcar. Even fewer of the streets have been blocked from allowing left-hand turns onto Bathurst7 or travel across the transit lane.

Really, most of what the transit lane is doing in terms of transit priority is removing parking spaces in the curb lane and adding no-stopping regulations (to the extent these are enforced), which reduces curb friction.

That’s not exactly nothing8, but it’s also not good transit priority. However, if all you’re looking for is a silver bullet called “dedicated transit lane”, then job done, time to go home.

What happens if that one silver bullet doesn’t work? We can always just move on to the next one. Which is exactly what I see starting to happen with transit signal priority, only this time the TTC is also adding to the confusion.

Transit signal crossing

Let’s go back to the April report measuring improvements to speeds on the Finch LRT and Eglinton Crosstown surface sections. That was only one part of a larger report to lay out a plan for improvements to the streetcar lines.

If you read the recommendations and summary section of the report, you could be forgiven for thinking that transit signal priority had arrived for the LRTs, been a great success, and would now be rolled out to the streetcars. Two of the four recommendations were to implement transit signal priority measures. Recent transit signal priority enhancements were reported to deliver time savings of up to 42% per intersection. And the round-trip time was reduced by 10 minutes on Eglinton and 20 minutes on Finch.

The only problem? No new9 transit signal priority was rolled out on the Finch or Eglinton LRTs between December and April. What the TTC did instead was called lagging left-turns. Instead of a red light followed by a left turn signal followed by a green light, they changed the intersections to be a red light followed by a green light followed by a left turn signal. The TTC called this transit signal priority in the report. Reporters understood the TTC to be saying that lagging left turns are transit signal priority. But they aren’t.

A lagging left turn changes the order in which the signals in a cycle appear, but it does not change the total amount of red light time in the cycle. If there are 75 seconds of red time between the cross traffic movement and the left turn signal, it doesn’t matter what order those phases are going in — the odds of the LRT vehicle showing up at a red light are mathematically unchanged. All you change is which cars the people on the LRT are likely to see moving instead of them during the red light. With a lagging left turn, they are less likely to see left-turning cars because that happens immediately after the green instead of immediately before it. But they still take the exact same amount of time to turn.

This is in contrast to phase rotation, where the order of the phases are changed depending on whether an LRT is present. So if the normal phase order is cross traffic, left turn, green, that can be dynamically changed to cross traffic, green, left when the LRT is waiting. This reduces the red time the LRT is facing, and so is actually transit signal priority. But if you read the TTC’s report carefully, this wasn’t rolled out on Finch or Eglinton. It was tested at two intersections on Spadina, which showed the 42% improvement referenced in the summary. The TTC is now planning to install phase rotation into the LRT lines, but it certainly wasn’t improving anything in the meantime.

So what actually improved the speeds on Finch and Eglinton? If you read down through the report sections it becomes clearer. The TTC changed the operations of the two LRTs. They reduced dwell times at stops and added operators so that they could swap operators at the end of a trip, so that mandatory breaks wouldn’t delay the vehicles. I also read speculation on social media that the padding from the trip schedules was reduced, and that speed limits were raised to match the adjacent car traffic, but I haven’t seen that confirmed by the TTC.

The TTC didn’t hide these operational changes, but it certainly didn’t emphasize them. Why? I would guess it’s because they aren’t transit signal priority, and everyone wanted transit signal priority. Council asked for transit signal priority. Advocates asked for transit signal priority. So the TTC spent some time and money tinkering with the signals to do nothing, and then also did some other actually effective stuff, and said voila, transit signal priority achieved.

I obviously would have liked for the TTC to communicate better about what it was doing, but this also matters going forward. The same report outlined a host of stale operations rules that are slowing down the streetcars. And the streetcar lines without dedicated lanes (i.e. most of them) won’t be able to use phase rotation because, for the most part, traffic lights along their routes don’t have left turn signals to be rotated. So what can actually be done in the near term to improve most streetcar lines isn’t transit signal priority, and it’s definitely not installing lagging left turns — it’s an improvement to operations (e.g. raising intersection and underpass speed limits). It would be good for the public, Council, the media and advocates to understand that clearly.

The road not altered

Despite our tendency to search for quick fixes and silver bullets, I do think the discussion around streetcars (and surface transit in general) is slowly becoming more sophisticated. The TTC report does acknowledge operations, stop spacing, and switches as contributing to the slow speeds of the streetcars.

However, I don’t think we’ve yet collectively realized how much more is done in other countries, and how much more we could be doing. Transit priority is not one, or three, or five things. It’s dozens of things that all need to be done correctly.

It’s transit signal priority and stop spacing and reliable switches. It’s island platforms and bus bulbs, so passengers aren’t spending precious seconds at every stop walking into traffic lanes to get to the streetcars. It’s level boarding and more doors to make it easier to board and alight, and to avoid deploying a slowly extending ramp for people unable to step up to the streetcars. It’s temporary tracks during construction so that streetcars don’t have to divert every time we tear up a road.

Most importantly, transit priority elsewhere includes a whole suite of tools that we don’t consider in Toronto. These tools change the configuration of the road or the traffic circulation pattern to give transit vehicles priority. They are summarized in a relatively new project called the Transit Priority Atlas which I can’t recommend enough.

I mentioned above that the Bathurst painted lane didn’t remove cars using the lane for left-hand turns at most intersections. There are ways to configure intersections to allow indirect left turns that would stop cars from holding up the streetcar, along Bathurst and elsewhere.

At the risk of becoming traffic lights guy, there is also the fact that the streetcars have to pass through a lot of lights. Have a look at the chart below, which shows the number of stops various TTC routes take along their length. The streetcars not only have a lot of stops compared to the bus routes, but they also go through more traffic signals.

The best traffic signal priority is removing the traffic signal. But to do that, the intersection often needs to be simplified. This can be done by making lateral streets right-in/right-out, or by simply dead-ending them. This would allow the removal of dozens of traffic lights along the streetcar routes.

There are also other ways of reducing the number of cars along a streetcar route. Through traffic can be reduced with contraflow lanes. You can go further and create sections of transit streets. Cities like Zurich and Bologna have adopted limited traffic zones in their downtowns, which limit access to residents, emergency vehicles, people with disabilities, and a limited number of permits for purchase. Bologna takes this a step further with a central “T” which only allows transit vehicles to pass through it. It’s not difficult to imagine something similar for Yonge Street.

I understand why councillors and advocates would have some hesitation in pushing for these changes. It’s been hard enough to get dedicated transit lanes and transit signal priority. These strategies would need to be studied and implemented by Transportation Services, who are not guaranteed to give a warm reception to the ideas.

But I think it’s worth putting the full suite of tools on the table and saying this is what fast streetcars use. We are decades behind other cities and it’s time we caught up. And of course I need to gesture towards the ongoing municipal election and say candidates should support better transit priority.

I’m sure opponents would argue that any given change will only save a minute and that’s not worth the disruption to drivers or loss of parking. But a few changes which each save a minute add up to a few minutes. And for most trips in Toronto, a few minutes is often the difference between worth your time or a waste of time. Suddenly, you have thousands of trips every day that are faster by streetcar. Thousands of cars stay at home. And now you have a streetcar that isn’t just for putting on postcards.

In other news

• City Hall Watcher’s Andrey Levkovski caught up with Parkdale-High Park Council contender Diana Chan McNally at last week’s Planning and Housing Committee. McNally was emphatic about leaving Billy Bishop Airport as it is and said councillors should help residents pressure Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to halt the expansion. “If the City doesn’t have the power, people certainly do. And I think a councillor’s role is also to support and galvanize the community to lobby the federal government to stop this,” she told CHW.

More from Matt: on crime as an election game-changer, and “you shall not pass!”

🎧 I was on CBC’s This is Toronto podcast last week to talk about the Salsa on St. Clair shooting, the political fallout, and whether this is a game-changing moment for the mayoral race. Give it a listen.

🗞️ For the Toronto Star this week, I am also writing about streetcars. Writing about streetcars is this year’s hot summer trend, I think. I’m focusing on the TTC’s new pilot project to track the number of drivers who blow by open doors. I like the idea, but I’m not sure why a pilot is necessary when the problem is so clear.

Look for it in your favourite newspaper.

The week at Toronto City Hall

By Andrey Levkovski and Matt Elliott

MONDAY: 🗂️ The General Government Committee met. They confronted the truth about software for cats and dogs. In 2024, the City entered into a no-bid deal with Kingston, Ontario-based tech company DocuPet to try out a new system for licensing Toronto pets. The deal was pitched as coming at no cost to City Hall, as DocuPet would make money by upselling pet owners on “customizable and stylized licensing tags, as well as other pet-related products.”

Despite some “privacy complaints related to DocuPet’s use of customer information”, Council voted to execute another no-bid deal with DocuPet in 2025, but this time there were costs. The City was on the hook for covering about $136,200 annually in credit card fees and postage costs related to the DocuPet service.

A year later, the bill is going up again, as DocuPet is seeking a four-dollar fee for each license issued and a $2.75 fee for every replacement tag given when the original tag is lost. That adds up to another $298,392 annually, bringing the total annual bill for software that started out as a freebie to $434,592.

That’s a more than 200% increase over the 2025 deal, and an infinite increase over the original zero-dollar deal. (To help pay for the ongoing costs, staff are also proposing adding an automatic inflationary increase to the fee charged to license a cat or a dog.)

And DocuPet will retain the right to upsell members of the public on pet products. Woof.

Still, staff are supportive of the deal, arguing that the deal with DocuPet has allowed them to reduce the staff needed to run the previous in-house pet licensing program. But the committee was not yet convinced. Noting there’s an “issue with the financing”, chair Councillor Paul Ainslie moved to send the item to Council without a committee recommendation. He’s asking for staff to produce “updated financial information related to the proposed contract amendment” in time for next week’s Council meeting.

The committee also considered a $14.2 million deal with Beanfield for internet service, and a notable $508,800 deal with Haywood Hunt — a surveillance company. The City needs the contract so it can continue spying on the crews it hires to do tree maintenance, the report says. This “allows for better oversight and performance of tree maintenance contracts,” apparently. Being a tree spy does sound like a fun job.

TUESDAY: 🗄️ Mayor Olivia Chow’s Executive Committee meets.

They’ll check out some always-fun budget and reserve fund variance reports. The operating budget variance report for 2026 shows that City Hall is running on a razor’s edge, posting a $4.6 million operating budget deficit through the end of April and projecting a $97.4 million deficit at year-end. (Reminder: City Hall is not allowed to post deficits.)

The report lists declining transit revenue and increased labour and fuel costs as the major factors behind the disappointing numbers. Everyone knows what’s causing fuel costs to spike, but the other two are interesting.

Notably, the TTC has seen a 50% decline in post-secondary pass sales following federal changes that limited the number of international students coming to Toronto. The wild winter weather was a major blow to fare revenue, too.

On the labour front, overtime costs are up huge at Toronto Fire, after the provincial government passed legislation that increases eligibility for workplace injury compensation and requires firefighters to receive additional training and qualifications. Collectively, the City estimates these changes have resulted in about $43 million in additional overtime costs.

In better news, the municipal land transfer tax continues to somehow stand stubbornly resilient against the forces of the dismal real estate market. The tax brought in $225 million through the end of April, about 10% above the budgeted amount.

The capital variance report, meanwhile, includes three pieces of news: first, the City is doing a much better job of late spending money. The City is on track to spend 89.9% of its $5.4 billion capital budget by year-end. That continues a positive trend.

Partly as a result of the improved spending rate, the City’s reserve fund balances actually declined in 2025.

Though more capital spending is generally good — better to spend money fixing and building stuff than just let it sit in a bank account — the report warns that the provincial government’s new Buy Ontario Act could have some negative impacts: “The new procurement requirements may result in delays, affecting project delivery due to extended procurement timelines, which could result in deferring project expenditures to later in the year or into future fiscal periods.” Ominous!

The final 2025 budget variance report also reveals that City Hall will not be BFFs with the province this year. In May, Queen’s Park informed Toronto that the City had not met the province’s housing target for 2025, and that there would be no funds coming to City Hall via the Building Faster Fund (BFF).

The committee will also consider a proposed deal with the Toronto Tempo. The WNBA team would lease part of the City-owned property at 701 Fleet Street for 40 years, with two possible 20-year extensions, at the low low price of just one dollar per year. The Tempo want to build a roughly 60,000-square-foot practice centre with two indoor basketball courts near their home arena at Coca-Cola Coliseum.

In return, the City will get at least 2,260 hours in the building every year for public programs, camps and permits, with a focus on women, girls and youth. The Tempo will also build a public park with outdoor basketball courts and washrooms. The deal could get the park open at least ten years earlier than currently planned. The practice centre is expected to open in summer 2028, with the park following that fall.

On paper, that sounds like a slam dunk. It is not completely free to the City, though. The City is on the hook to pay about $800,000 a year to operate the park, washrooms and public programs. Exhibition Place also expects to lose approximately $491,000 in parking revenue in 2027, when the existing parking lot disappears.

Also on the agenda:

• In February 2025, Council approved the creation of an advisory body to consider the thorny question of municipal autonomy. That led to the creation of the Municipal Autonomy and Effective Local Governance Program Advisory Body. The City calls it “MAPAB” for short, which is… not really an accurate acronym, but whatever. The final report of the group is a useful document, outlining the challenges Toronto City Hall has faced in recent years when it comes to autonomy and recommending the City direct legal staff to work on a single-province amendment to Canada’s Constitution, “which could include a new provision giving constitutionally protected status to City Charters.” Staff are not yet ready to fully embrace that path, however. City Manager Paul Johnson is recommending the committee request a further report analyzing the MAPAB’s findings, due Q3 2027.

• The committee will get an update on the Toronto Community Crisis Service, which sends civilian crisis workers to eligible mental health calls. From March 2022 to May 2026, the service received 49,185 calls. In 2025, it received 4,482 eligible calls through 9-1-1 and resolved 76.7% of them without police. Crisis teams also made 11,659 referrals to health and social services. Now the City wants to make the service much bigger. The plan is to move dispatching to Toronto Paramedic Services in 2027, increase the number of calls transferred from 9-1-1 from about 5,300 this year to more than 10,000 a year by 2031, and accept more referrals from hospitals, community organizations, and other institutions. The report estimates the service could eventually receive between 45,000 and 50,000 calls a year. Adopting the recommendation would have no immediate effect on the City’s finances. The 2026 budget already includes $37.3 million for the service. Expansion costs will need to be factored into future budgets. The report says sustaining and expanding the service will require continued investment across different levels of government.

• The Executive Committee will consider who should own the ⁠Spirit Garden at Nathan Phillips Square. The garden opened in 2024 as a permanent place to honour residential school survivors and the children who were lost to their families and communities. It was developed by the Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre in partnership with the City. The Aboriginal Affairs Advisory Committee wants staff to report to the Executive Committee in the second quarter of 2027 on a possible transfer of ownership of the Spirit Garden site at Nathan Phillips Square from the City to Council Fire, an Indigenous non-profit organization.

WEDNESDAY: 🐕 The Dangerous Dog Tribunal meets. They’ll consider appeals to muzzle orders given to Greyhound Milo and American Bulldog mix Big Louis.

🚇 The TTC Board meets.

CEO Mandeep Lali’s monthly report⁠ includes some interesting data from work the transit agency did to prep for a pilot aimed at drivers who pass a stopped streetcar while its doors are open. Before installing cameras on four streetcars, transit checkers manually recorded 145 illegal passes on six routes between December 2025 and March 2026.

Those daily checks found more illegal passes than the Toronto Transit Commission’s ten-year total of passenger-vehicle contact claims. The preliminary results suggest near misses may be common. Shocker.

The nine-month pilot officially starts today. The cameras will measure how often illegal streetcar passing occurs and test the technology’s reliability for future automated enforcement. Basically, it will test whether the camera footage could eventually support tickets. Alas, tickets will not be issued as part of the pilot.

The agenda will also include a discussion of the best way to commemorate the work of the late former TTC chair Howard Moscoe. A report recommends naming the atrium at Yorkdale Station after Moscoe, in part because of Moscoe’s tireless efforts to restore the Arc en Ciel art installation at Yorkdale. After decades in storage, the art is expected to return soon.

In addition, because speeding up streetcars is all the rage these days, Councillor Dianne Saxe has brought a motion to the agenda asking for a report on ways to give some graduated speed to the College streetcar.

THURSDAY: 🚔 The Police Service Board meets.

The cops are asking the board to approve a $10.54-million non-competitive contract with Rampart International for 5,861 Glock G45 duty pistols, 500 compact Glock G43X pistols and 200 training pistols. That is 6,561 pistols altogether. That is a lot of Glocks. 🔫

According to the Police Board report, many of their current pistols are getting old. Some date back to 1992, and replacement parts and ammunition are getting harder and more expensive to buy. Rampart would receive the contract without competition because it is Glock’s exclusive Canadian distributor for military and police customers.

The first $2 million would be reallocated from money budgeted for the new 54 Division police station, with that money scheduled to be returned to the station project through the 2027 budget. Police would seek the remaining $8.54 million through the 2027 capital budget. Staff estimate that lower ammunition and repair costs would make the switch roughly cost-neutral over ten years, with nominal savings of $166,000.

The board will also get an update on the state of the $1.4 billion police budget. Even with the big spending envelope, the cops are on track to post a $15 million deficit this year. The overrun is driven almost entirely by premium pay.

The agenda also includes Chief Myron Demkiw’s annual report, which includes a note making it clear the cops were totally ready to let George Springer ride a police horse, had the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series last fall:

Following post-game comments by Blue Jays player George Springer about celebrating with a ride on a police horse, the Mounted Unit publicly invited Springer to ride Service horse Blue Jay should the team win the World Series. While the Blue Jays did not ultimately secure the title, the exchange reflected the Service’s commitment to approachable, community-focused policing.

🏚️ The Preservation Board meets.

Planning staff are recommending heritage designation for the Weston Lions Arena on Lawrence West. It’s another twist in the long-running saga for the arena, which was built in the late 40s. At one point, the arena was slated for the wrecking ball, as part of a plan to build a new MLSE Launchpad recreation facility on the site. After Premier Doug Ford and a bunch of angry hockey players raised their sticks in protest, the plan was revised to maintain the arena while building a youth sports hub next door.

The board will also consider designating ⁠Simcoe Hall and Convocation Hall, two U of T landmarks that have been listed on the City’s Heritage Register since 1973. ⁠ These buildings score seven out of nine criteria points for their architecture, history and contribution to university life, which is impressive since only two points are needed. Safe to say they pass with honours.

FRIDAY: 🅿️ The Parking Authority Board meets. Their agenda includes a report recommending a seven-month extension of the contract with Shift Transit to operate the Bike Share system. The $14 million deal is presented as a temporary move while staff put together a big RFP for a long-term operator, which is planned to launch in Q1 2027.

A separate budget report shows the Bike Share system continues its uphill climb. Revenue through the end of June was $7.9 million, up $1.5 million compared to 2025.

The agenda also recommends approving a $3.8 million contract to build out a new six-level underground garage in Yorkville.

NEXT WEEK: Council meets, for the last and final time this term. Get hyped.

Weekly wrap

🗳️ CANDID CANDIDATES: The 2026 Election Candidate Tracker has been updated — with new registrations from incumbent councillors Frances Nunziata, Chris Moise, Neethan Shan, Nick Mantas and Alejandra Bravo.

🪧 SIGNS OF THE TIMES: 118 TANGLE BRIARWAY: Tangle Briarway; 4925 STEELES AVE W: Electronic Static Billboard; 790 MILITARY TRL: Popeyes; 437 SPADINA AVE: Puuffy; 240 EGLINTON AVE E: Flossy; 621 SHEPPARD AVE E: Injection Lounge Aesthetics Clinic; 126 MARTIN ROSS AVE: Empire Hardware; 322 CHURCH ST: Student Community Centre; 1401 HUNTINGWOOD DR: Ram Plastics; 1001 QUEEN ST E: New Era; 105 RIVER ST: Aic Tile Studio; 3385 DUNDAS ST W: Fabutan Hush Lash Studio; 3125 STEELES AVE E: Yondr; 2268 KINGSTON RD: Brik Construction Inc.; 941 PROGRESS AVE: Centennial College; 29 BATHURST ST: Setai Dental; 141 BAY ST: CIBC. (Sign Permit Applications since July 13, 2026)

City Hall Watcher #393

Thanks for reading! And thanks to Damien and Andrey for their contributions this week. Andrey and I will be back next week to preview the agenda for the final Council meeting of the term. The agenda isn’t published yet, but I can already tell you one thing about it: it will be long as hell.

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To start, let’s take a look at the mayoral race. The electoral landscape is a real land of contrasts at the moment. On one side, you’ve got the incumbent, Mayor Olivia Chow, who has signed up but hasn’t really star…

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That’s the total number of agenda matters up for consideration this week as Community Councils for Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke York and Toronto & East York get together for the final time this term. Most agendas this term have been much shorter but with the end of the term looming, they are trying to cram a who…

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