Tens of thousands declare early to avoid Toronto's vacant home tax

Toronto's redesigned vacant home tax rollout has begun, with over 45,000 people filing their paperwork in the first week.

Some councillors say they were left responding to complaints about the rollout, after the city's online declaration portal experienced technical problems shortly after launch.

The city's chief technology officer, Sonia Brar, said for two to three hours last Monday the city's online system would not accept form submissions, which is how city residents would make their declaration for the tax. The vacant tax portal was part of a suite of online city services that was affected by the problem, she said. 

"We were ready and we are ready," Brar said of the launch of the vacant home tax portal.

"We did have a global issue that affected a lot of our shared services on our portal, and that's where we saw the performance (issue)."

That brief problem occurred just days after a soft launch of the web portal and the start of a redesigned vacant home tax system. The fee is intended to fight the city's housing crisis, pushing people with empty homes to sell or rent them to avoid the tax.

Last year's rollout saw over over 169,000 city residents complain after being wrongly charged the fee. 

Brar said city staff have rebuilt the declaration portal in a bid to make it more user-friendly.

Usage is up this year compared to the approximate 2,000 people who declared online during the first week of last year's declaration period.

"We really did take the feedback we got from last year's process to heart and tried to simplify it as much as possible," she said.

Tens of thousands of reminder letters in bright yellow envelopes have begun to arrive in the mail to homes across the city. The letters inside, written in multiple languages, point people to a number of places to make a declaration, including the online portal.

City spokesperson Beth Waldman encouraged anyone who ran into problems last Monday to try to make the declaration again either online or over the phone to 311.

"Get it done, get it off your to do list, and then you don't have to think about it until next year," she said.

Mayor Olivia Chow called the tax's initial rollout earlier this year "fundamentally flawed," and city council backed her push for a complete redesign of the program.