Tell the Budget Committee: It’s Time to Invest More for a Better City

On January 21 and 22, the Budget Committee will be holding meetings across the City to hear what is most important to Torontonians in the 2025 City Budget. SPT has been pouring through the Budget documents to see how the proposed budget responds to the urgent needs in our communities. 

In this post, we share our key priorities for this year’s budget to help you prepare your deputation to the Budget Committee. For more information on how to register to depute and additional resources and analysis from our partners, check out our recent blog post and Budget Town Hall video

New Investments in Response to Years of Austerity and Escalating Problems

This year’s budget builds on the historic new investments in services in the 2024 City Budget and includes further funding for critical programs and services. Last October, with the input of many of our community partners, Social Planning Toronto submitted a letter to the Mayor asking her to focus the 2025 budget into the services and programs that will address the root causes of poverty and the services low-income residents need. We are pleased to see many of the investments we recommended in the 2025 budget, despite the uphill battle the budget will have for a second year in a row after more than a decade of austerity and underfunding. SPT and the community partners and residents we work with have spent years banging the drums outside of City Hall to call attention to the escalating and multiple crises facing our city. The 2024 and 2025 City Budgets have begun to respond to this call, although the problems had gone unaddressed for so long they will require significantly greater investments.  

This year’s budget does, however, take important steps to address the needs of our communities that are experiencing the devastating impacts of poverty and a lack of affordability, including:

Investing in Children & Youth

  • Over $8M in additional funding invested in Youth Violence Prevention programs, youth hubs, an Indigenous Youth Fellowship program, and other youth- and family-focused community supports
  • $6M in new funding to expand the Student Food Program to an additional 21,500 students by the end of 2025
  • $1.01M to provide breakfast/mid morning snacks at 45 CampTO programs, including 35 locations within Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, feeding up to 31,085 children

Supporting Tenants and Preventing Evictions

  • $1M increase to the Toronto Rent Bank to support 300 additional households
  • $800K for a new program to support 130-170 tenants to top up their rent and stay housed
  • $350K new funding for the Tenant Support Program to provide additional tenant legal support, information resources, advocacy, and tenant organizing
  • $1.368M to add 10 positions to support RentSafeTO, an apartment building standards enforcement program

Addressing the Homelessness Crisis

  • $1.79M (plus $1.34M in the Parks budget) to expand the Encampment Office
  • $1M to support outreach on the TTC for people experiencing homelessness
  • $568K to provide mental health & wellness supports to shelter staff 
  • $400K to support shelter residents with complex needs
  • $380K to increase drop-in hours during the winter months
  • $168.6 million in the Capital Program to build new shelter sites

Vital Community Programs

  • 3.5% inflationary increase to the Community Partnership & Investment Programs (CPIP) to support community-based organizations
  • $3.6M to increase library hours on Sundays and improve equitable access to branch service across the city Monday to Saturday
  • $565K to expand services that bring essential mental health and crisis supports directly to vulnerable library customers
  • $248K to expand the Financial Empowerment program that supports residents to access income supports and benefits. 
  • Expansion of Outdoor Pool Hours by two hours per day for all pools and extend the Outdoor Pool and Wading Pools Season at select locations
  • Establish a pilot project to reduce barriers and improve participation in free recreation programming for local residents 

Funding a Transit System That Low-income Residents Can Rely On

  • Freezing TTC fares, that can help low-income residents to use the transit system
  • $3.3M to improving street car service and have faster subway service 
  • More frequent service on crowded bus routes in midday, evening and weekend periods
  • A pilot program on the TTC's 10 most unreliable routes to keep vehicles evenly spaced with consistent wait times
  • Increasing Wheel Trans service to allow for a 12% increase in new registrants

Protecting Residents from the Effects of Extreme Weather

  • $200K for a new cooling program for up to 425 low-income and vulnerable tenant households to have portable air conditioners in apartment buildings to manage the effects of extreme heat 
  • Increasing funding to build gardens, trees and green spaces along city-owned roads that can capture rainwater and prevent flooding, while providing shade during high-heat conditions

SPT welcomes the decisions City Council has made to invest in improving the lives of Toronto residents who are struggling the most, but it won’t be enough.

Our City and its Residents Are in Crisis: Toronto by the Numbers

The latest statistics and the City’s own numbers tell the story of what we have been hearing from our community partners: that Toronto’s needs are greater than what this budget provides for.

  • Toronto Shelter and Support Services are reporting that more families with children are seeking emergency shelter (City of Toronto, 2025). Toronto now has the highest child poverty rate among major Canadian cities and large municipalities at 25.3%, exceeding the national rate of 18.1% and Ontario’s rate of 19.5% (Social Planning Toronto, 2024), with 117,890 children living in low-income families (Social Planning Toronto, 2024).
  • In 2023, 24.9% of Toronto households reported food insecurity, with the rates significantly higher among low-income families (City of Toronto, 2025).
  • Drug toxicity remains the leading cause of death among individuals experiencing homelessness, representing 40% of deaths of unhoused people in Toronto in 2023 (Toronto Public Health, 2024); Toronto Paramedic Services is anticipating a 54% increase in emergency calls related to drug toxicity in 2025, compared to 2019 levels(City of Toronto, 2025). Meanwhile, the Province of Ontario is closing many supervised consumption sites, leaving community services to respond. 
  • Over 11,000 people were actively homeless in the past three months, while unmet shelter demands continue to rise (City of Toronto). As of December 2024, Canada's youth unemployment rate (ages 15 to 24) increased to 14.4%, up from 13.9% in November 2024 (Statistics Canada, 2025). Youth unemployment in Toronto remains higher than the national average and hit multi-year highs at 16.3% in April 2024 (CBC, 2024). Social Development, Finance and Administration (SDFA) report that there will be more than 1,000 fewer jobs for youth due to a loss in federal funding for the Youth Job Corps program (City of Toronto, 2025). 
  • Many of Toronto’s emergency shelters are still not fully accessible and the City must follow-through on commitments for all new affordable and rental housing to embed universal design standards. 
  • Furthermore, Indigenous organizations continue to be under-funded compared to their mainstream counterparts and further progress needs to be made on Toronto’s Reconciliation Action Plan. 

These are some of the problems that will need significant investments to reverse. Communities across Toronto are suffering and community-based organizations are doing everything in their power to meet growing needs with stagnant or decreasing resources. This is no time for cuts. We cannot afford a return to austerity when setting property taxes that will underfund our city.

We need City Council to commit to ending poverty and building a more equitable Toronto as a top priority

While this proposed budget responds to many of the growing needs of our residents, our communities need more to address the rapid rise in poverty, lack of affordability, and economic and social inequality. SPT has been calling on City Council to release an updated, fully-funded Poverty Reduction Strategy Action Plan with clear, measurable targets to tackle the root causes of poverty. Having a comprehensive, measurable plan that is developed in partnership with community partners and people with lived experience is essential to building a collective path for all residents, communities and the city to thrive. 

In the interim, we are calling on City Council to invest further in critical community services and programs including:

  • Double the increases in Rent Bank and the Eviction Prevention in the Community program to support an additional 900 households
  • An increase of $3.5M to drop-in programs to respond to the closure of the supervised consumption sites and an anticipated demand for services and $500K to provide mental health and wellness supports for drop-in workers
  • Further invest in community-based organizations by increasing the annual funding envelope by at least $5M to expand access to grassroots groups and organizations focused on Black, Indigenous, other racialized and newcomer communities to support increased demands for services 
  • Provide cost of living and inflationary adjustments to all community grant programs across all divisions, not just those funded through CPIP 
  • Invest additional funding to open more warming centres and improve access to harm reduction services outside of the downtown core, particularly in Scarborough and Etobicoke
  • In response to the growing need for shelter spaces for survivors of gender-based violence, at least a third of new shelter spaces be dedicated as women+ only spaces to provide safe, trauma-informed care 
  • Ensure sufficient funding to support tenants displaced due to the enforcement of the Multi-Tenant Housing (Rooming Houses) by-law
  • Additional investments to support youth employment and strong advocacy to the federal government to reinstate previous levels of annual investments in youth employment.
  • Fully fund and deliver a deeper discount for the Fair Pass transit program and begin fare capping to make transit more affordable for everyone
  • Embed accessibility and universal design in all shelter and affordable housing planning and service delivery
  • Prioritize and further invest in advancing Toronto’s Reconciliation Action Plan
  • Improve wages for recreation workers making minimum wage to lift them out of poverty
  • Freeze fees for recreation programs so that families can continue to afford to send their kids to these programs
  • Meet Council's commitments to accessibility in new housing and prioritize progress on the Reconciliation Action Plan.
  • Establish a capital funding strategy to support building more non-profit and public child care and a workforce strategy to address the disparity in wages and benefits among child care workers. Establish funding for subsidies to help the almost 20,000 families on the child care waitlist.

 

We’re Counting on City Council to Make the Right Decisions to Continue Investing in our City 

Last year, City Council made the responsible decision to increase property taxes to begin to rebuild after years of austerity budgets. Despite this increase, Toronto still has one of the lowest property tax rates in the GTHA. We need City Council to continue to make the difficult decisions to repair the damage that years of underfunding has had on our city.

City Council must also make the difficult decision to prioritize upstream programs and services that will prevent violence, enhance neighbourhoods, and address the root causes of poverty. This means reducing funds in other areas. Toronto residents have overwhelmingly sent this message to City Council. During the City’s public consultation process this past fall, the police were identified as the top service that residents said should have their budget reduced. Yet, we are seeing a significant increase in this year’s budget ($56.7 M gross ($46.2M net) a 3.9% increase) with more increases expected after the collective bargaining process is completed. The police budget will continue to grow in future years with an approved plan to increase the size of the police force over the next five years. This decision is not evidence-based as research shows a bigger police force does not result in reduced crime rates or a safer city (learn more about the hiring plan in SPT’s December City Budget Watch post). While other City divisions are being asked to find savings, we don’t see the same level of accountability when it comes to police spending. 

The 2025 City Budget, like the 2024 City Budget, takes necessary steps toward meeting the needs of all residents across Toronto. But after over a decade of underfunding of critical community programs and services, more investments are needed. We cannot break last year’s momentum when there is still so much work ahead of us. We cannot cut services when they have still not had the proper time to flourish. Now is the time to build on the foundations of last year’s budget and invest in a Toronto that works for all residents. 

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