How to have your say in Toronto's 2025 budget

As the City of Toronto continues to tackle a budget gap, officials are asking Torontonians where they want public dollars spent in what is becoming an annual consultation.

The city launched an online survey earlier this month to take resident feedback on what should be in the 2025 city budget, but Saturday was the first of four in-person consultation sessions taking place around Toronto in October. There will also be two virtual sessions.

The city introduced the public consultations last November, as it tried to tackle a $1.8-billion budget shortfall. Budget chief Shelley Carroll told reporters on Saturday that the experiment was a success, and that's why it's been brought back.

"This is an annual process now," she said at the packed meeting at North York Memorial Community Hall. "So that each year, the budget is actually being applied where the needs are."

Carroll said the city has also been able to close its budget gap this year but that exact figures wouldn't be publicly available until the new year.

Stephen Conforti, the city's chief financial officer, has said the situation isn't that bleak as the city prepares for next year's budget.

Mayor Olivia Chow said investments in housing affordability and shelters, a fare freeze for transit service, increased library hours, a bigger police budget and more funding for after-school programs this year were all influenced by priorities highlighted by residents during last year's consultations.

This year, the city has added an online tool for people to try their hand at balancing the budget themselves. The program will show how money invested in one area takes away money from other city services and programs.

"It's not just hearing your opinions — you get to know how our budget is put together," Chow said.

To pay for last year's budget, the city raised the municipal property tax by 9.5 per cent, the largest increase in decades, something Chow said at the time was necessary to cover Toronto's large budget shortfall.

Joe Mihevc, an adjunct professor at York University who served on Toronto city council for nearly 30 years, said the city needs to look for new revenue streams to pay for the priorities identified by residents.

"That's the magic sauce of this moment right now," he said. "To be able to find that place of personal affordability in terms of a potential tax increase, while at the same time building the services and kind of city that people have also been clamouring for."

Mihevc said the city should pressure other levels of government to help pay for programs outside the city's jurisdiction — such as continuing to ask the federal government to help cover the cost of shelter space taken up by refugees or lobbying the province to cover the health and housing costs associated with growing homelessness.

Without that, Mihevc said, property tax hikes will be the only way to cover budget gaps — and that will become even more unpopular next year with a municipal election scheduled for 2026. He said the city needs to ask for more long-term funding from Ottawa and Queen's Park or it will have to request new money each year to stay afloat.