On Friday, January 24, the Budget Committee will hold its final wrap up meeting on the 2025 City budget. It’s an important meeting. The committee will identify priorities and make recommendations to the Mayor for the preparation of the Mayor’s budget. The wrap up meeting follows the Budget Committee’s three-day review of the Staff-Prepared 2025 City Budget and two days of public hearings where community members identified their priorities for the city.
Mayor Chow will consider the staff-prepared budget, what she’s heard from Toronto residents, and the recommendations of the Budget Committee in the preparation of the Mayor’s budget—expected to be released on Thursday, January 30. February 11 is the last day for the 2025 City Budget process, when Toronto City Council will meet for a final debate and vote on amendments to the Mayor’s budget.
The Budget Committee’s recommendations to the Mayor impact the final budget. We need the committee to send a strong message to the Mayor for a budget that prioritizes action on poverty and support for marginalized communities who are struggling amidst a deep and ongoing affordability crisis. The staff-prepared budget includes almost $36.5 million in funding for new and enhanced programs and services to advance the City’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. It’s essential that these investments are maintained. This is no time to back down on these commitments. In fact, we need the Mayor’s budget to go further in response to multiple and intensifying crises in the community.
TO Prosperity: Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy
In 2015, Toronto City Council unanimously endorsed the TO Prosperity: Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, a 20-year strategy with a powerful vision for the city:
By 2035, Toronto is a city with opportunities for all: a leader in the collective pursuit of justice, fairness and equity. We want to be renowned as a city where everyone has access to good jobs, adequate income, stable housing, affordable transportation, nutritious food, and supportive services.
A decade later, the reality for many Toronto residents is far from this inspiring vision. Child poverty rates have risen by record levels for two years in a row with over one-quarter of the city’s children living in low-income households. The rates are much higher for Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, and newcomer children, as well as children from one-parent and non-permanent resident families. One in ten Toronto residents are now relying on food banks, with unprecedented levels of food insecurity and hunger. Toronto emergency shelters are full with 223 residents, on average, turned away each night due to a lack of available shelter accommodation. Tenants lack access to affordable and accessible housing, face threats of eviction, and experience long waits for social housing with over 100,000 Toronto households on the waiting list. The drug toxicity crisis is significant and anticipated to worsen with the provincial closure of supervised consumption sites.
Last year, the 2024 City budget included historic levels of new investment in poverty reduction initiatives. But one year is not enough to turn around Toronto’s decline. After more than a decade of austerity budgets, there is much work to do to create the prosperous and equitable city for all envisioned by City Council in Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Toronto City Council needs to double down on its commitments.
What’s at Risk?
The Staff-Prepared 2025 City Budget includes many critical investments and enhancements to advance the Poverty Reduction Strategy and improve life in the city for Toronto residents living in poverty. It invests in children and youth, tenant supports and eviction prevention, supports for unhoused residents, funding for vital community programs and public services, improvements to public transit services, and protecting low-income and marginalized residents from extreme heat.
But none of these public and community service improvements will happen if they are not supported by City Council. Supporting this budget—and making it better—starts with the Budget Committee. At its January 24 meeting, the committee needs to safeguard the existing actions on poverty reduction and recommend further improvements where the current budget falls short.
Let’s consider a few of these enhancements and what they’ll mean for Toronto residents and families:
Children and Youth: Expanding Access to Food Programs
- $6 million to expand the Student Food Program to an additional 21,500 students by the end of 2025
- $1.01 million to provide breakfast/mid morning snacks at 45 CampTO programs, including 35 locations within Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, feeding up to 31,085 children
New investments in these two food programs (Student Food Program + Camp Food Program in CampTO) will feed up to an additional 52,585 children and youth by the end of 2025—more than 2.6 times the capacity of the Scotiabank Arena! Put another way, that’s the equivalent of feeding nearly all of the children who live in Toronto Centre, Scarborough-Guildwood, and Humber River-Black Creek combined—the wards with the highest rates of child poverty in the city.
According to Toronto Public Health, the addition of 21,500 students in the Student Food Program includes “8,000 students in 23 school communities added in December 2024, approximately 5,200 more students through increased enrollment in existing programs in 2025, and the program's expansion in 2025 to an additional 8,300 students in 25 additional school communities.” With this new investment, Toronto Public Health anticipates 43,491 more students will participate in the Student Food Program in 2026, compared to just four years earlier in 2022 (see graph below comparing 2026 projected to 2022 actual figures).
Source: Toronto Public Health budget note (2025)
According to the Parks and Recreation division, the investment of $1.0167 million will support the “Camp Nutrition Program (breakfast/mid morning snack including plate and cutlery) to be offered at 45 CampTO locations reaching up to 31,085 participants based on 2024 registration maximums. This includes 35 locations (24 free and 11 paid centres) within Neighbourhood Improvement Areas and 10 free centres located outside of Neighbourhood Improvement Areas.”
With over one-quarter of children living in poverty in Toronto and children making up 23% of Toronto food bank clients, expanding food programs is essential. Just over $7 million in new investment in these two food programs will support the health, wellbeing, food security, social inclusion, educational success, and long-term development of tens of thousands of children, youth, and their families across the City.
Toronto Public Library’s Open Hours Plan: Expanding to Seven-Day a Week Service, 12 Months a Year, at All 100 Library Branches by July 2026
“The best thing a library can be is open.”
- Toronto Public Library staff at Budget Committee, January 16, 2025
At its October 2024 meeting, the Toronto Public Library (TPL) Board endorsed an updated Open Hours Plan for the TPL’s 100 branches. The revised plan builds on its original Open Hours Plan initiated in 2006, with an exciting new vision for library access across Toronto. According to the TPL, “[t]he revised plan will result in seven-day a week service, 12 months a year, at all 100 branches by July 2026.”
At the October 2024 TPL Board meeting, Chair Alim Remtulla commented that the TPL added 32,000 hours of service in its branches over the past 17 years, compared to the updated Open Hours Plan which will add 42,000 hours of service in just three years.
TPL states that the Open Hours Plan “is a key Library and City initiative to provide service access in support of community resilience and safety, mental health and well-being, and combating loneliness and social isolation. To help achieve these outcomes, the Plan is embedded in the City of Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy as an action to invest in extended hours for priority City services. TPL’s Open Hours Plan also drives many of the Library’s strategic outcomes including greater digital inclusion opportunities through increased access to the internet, Wi-Fi and computers; increased early childhood literacy programming; and reduced barriers to access for vulnerable seniors and youth and other equity-deserving groups.”
Demand for more open library hours is clear:
“As part of the 2024 open hours expansion, eight branches added Monday service along with additional mornings and evenings in July, 2024. Early results show that:
- For July, there was a 61% year-over-year increase in traffic for branches who received increased Monday to Saturday hours. Branches whose hours did not change increased year-over-year traffic as well, but only at about 6%.
- Furthermore, comparing June to July this year, branches whose hours increased Monday to Saturday saw traffic increase by 55%. Branches whose hours did not change did not see a month-over-month increase in visitor traffic (1% lower June to July).”
The 2025 City budget includes $3.6219 million for the second phase of a three-phase implementation plan. Of the $3.6219 million, $1.675 million will be used to “expand service hours, with 16 branches receiving additional Monday to Saturday hours in July 2025, 5 branches transitioning to year-round from seasonal Sunday service, and 67 Sunday branches extending their Sunday hours from 3.5 to 5 hours starting September 2025.” The remaining $1.947 million will be used to “add Sunday service to some branches and introduce Sunday service to the remaining 33 branches, resulting in all 100 branches offering year-round Sunday service by September 2025.”
The full-year (annualized) costs for the phase two implementation will be just over $9.6 million in 2026, plus an additional $2.38 million for the third and final implementation phase.
Toronto loves its public libraries. Open Hours is a bold and exciting plan that will benefit all Toronto residents, provide essential resources and supports to people living in poverty, and facilitate the social connection and engagement of the whole community.
The TTC Fare Freeze is a Poverty Reduction Measure
The Staff-Prepared 2025 City Budget freezes TTC fares for a second year in a row, with a goal of maintaining affordability and attracting and retaining ridership. Public transit advocacy group, TTCriders, point out that “over the last 30 years, TTC fares have risen 1.8 times the rate of inflation.” Without proper funding for TTC operations, the system has relied heavily on transit fares for many years. Fare freezes have been long overdue.
The fare freeze is especially important for Toronto residents struggling with poverty, food insecurity and the ongoing affordable housing crisis. After paying the rent, there’s little left to cover other essentials like food and transit. According to research by the Wellesley Institute, “[l]ow-income, Black and other racialized populations, older adults, women and newcomers are among those who rely on public transit the most to connect them with their places of work and education, health services, recreational and cultural activities and friends and family.” For people with mobility issues and other disabilities, Wheel Trans and accessible measures in the conventional transit system are both essential.
While freezing fares, this budget also funds important service improvements. Further, the provincial upload of maintenance costs for the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway will result in a 50% decrease in the TTC’s state of good repair backlog—providing urgently needed funding for repairs and maintenance of the transit system. While there are more changes needed to improve public transit, the fare freeze and service improvements are moving the TTC in the right direction after years of decline.
Maintaining the fare freeze is important to addressing the needs of low-income residents and supports ridership broadly.
The Budget Committee Needs to Support These and Other Actions on Poverty in the 2025 City Budget
The Budget Committee needs to support increased investments in child and youth food programs, the TPL’s Open Hours Plan, the TTC fare freeze, and all of the actions to address poverty contained in the Staff-Prepared 2025 City Budget—and then go further to recommend improvements to this budget where it falls short.
The City has the resources to make these changes and more. Keep in mind the Toronto Police Service (TPS) budget includes a $46.2 million increase from property taxes, and this doesn’t include the additional funds that will flow to the TPS once their collective agreement has been finalized. Enhancements to the Poverty Reduction Strategy total just under $36.5 million. That’s not for a single division. Those are funds split between 11 different divisions and agencies.
The Budget Committee needs to make action on poverty a priority. Toronto residents living in poverty, our neighbours who are unhoused, and those in the food bank line can’t afford the Budget Committee and Council to shy away from the City’s poverty reduction commitments. In fact, they need Toronto City Council to do even better.