Toronto’s 25 seats will help determine who wins the Ontario election Thursday. The Star asked Ontario’s Progressive Conservative, New Democratic, Liberal and Green parties for their Toronto-specific pledges. Here is a sample of what they told us:
Housing
PCs:
- Benefits from the More Homes, More Choice Act and the More Homes for Everyone Act. In Toronto, that includes partnering with the city to create 3,000 permanent homes, 2,000 of them supportive units for people at risk of homelessness. Funding includes $27 million to the city for supportive housing operating costs for the rest of this fiscal year.
- Provincewide, help get 1.5 million homes built over 10 years via a “Housing Supply Action Plan” to cut through red tape.
NDP:
- Enter rent controls. Meet a 1.5-million new-home target and establish a new public housing agency to finance and build 250,000 affordable and nonmarket homes.
- End exclusionary zoning — rules that prohibit even modest forms of housing density such as triplexes in certain areas — and create a “portable housing benefit” that, through direct financial support, would save 311,000 Ontario households an average of $300 per month in rent.
Liberals:
- Implement rent controls, “create a legal framework that protects renters to opt into rent-to-own agreements,” and “double the pace of homebuilding to help both renters and first-time home buyers.”
- Commit $360 million provincewide to operate social, supportive and community housing services and $60 million for planning and housing approvals. Create a new corporation to work with local communities and agencies including Toronto Community Housing to “build and maintain affordable homes of all types, either as a primarily financing source or builder.”
Greens:
- Build 182,000 new “permanently affordable community housing rental homes” over the next decade, extend rent controls, and strengthen rules and penalties for “renovic- tions and bad faith evictions.”
- Promote a “made-in-Ontario modular housing industry” (some municipalities have struggled to find contractors to meet deadlines in the federal Rapid Housing initiative) and “provincially fund 50 per cent of shelter and community housing costs while allowing municipalities to maintain management control .”
Transit
PCs:
- Keep building the Ontario Line started this term, plus the Scarborough subway, the Yonge north extension and the Eglinton Crosstown west extension. No specific commitment to the Waterfront LRT, which Toronto calls a priority.
- No commitment to ongoing operating funds for the TTC, or discounted fares for riders. The PCs note they did match a federal $316.2-million pandemic bailout for transit systems.
NDP:
- Restore 50-per-cent operating funding for local transit services, and implement a “10-minutes-or-better service guarantee” for the TTC and other systems.
- Give riders two hours of unlimited travel across all municipal transit services in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton area for a “single low flat-rate” fare. Let TTC riders use the GO system within Toronto at no extra cost.
- Build the Scarborough subway extension, Crosstown LRT, Finch West LRT, the Ontario Line subway, the Durham-Scarborough busway and Yonge subway extension, and get started on lines including the Waterfront LRT.
Liberals:
- Boost transit use by slashing all public transit fares across the province to $1 until January 2024 — a move some experts have branded regressive — and maintain “all existing funded transit plans.”
- Build lines including the Eglinton East LRT extension to the University of Toronto Scarborough and Malvern; the Sheppard subway extension connecting to the Scarborough subway and the Waterfront LRT.
- Invest $375 million provincewide in annual transit operating funding (just the TTC’s operating budget is more than $2 billion) and force transportation agency Metrolinx to provide “greater, transparency and community benefits.”
Greens:
- Triple transit use by 2030 with measures including restoring the province’s obligation to pay half the cost of local transit operations, while cutting transit fares in half “for at least three months” across all Ontario transit systems.
- Prioritize public transit in all planning decisions, electrify transit systems as soon as possible and triple the number of dedicated bus lanes by 2025.
public safety
PCs:
- Continue investments like $72 million provided to Toronto police for eight public safety initiatives under the Community Safety and Policing Grant Program. They include a public safety response team, a “dedicated shooting response team,” and money over three years to fight gang and gun violence.
- The PCs say investing in policing and border controls will make people safer than gun controls.
NDP:
- Ban handgun and ammunition sales in Ontario’s urban areas. Toronto Mayor John Tory has called for a national, or at least provincial, handgun ban.
- Restore and increase funding for education programs aimed at giving vulnerable young people, including those from low-income and racialized areas, options and opportunities.
Liberals:
- Ban the sale, possession, transportation and storage of handguns, and work with “law enforcement partners to move people with addictions, disabilities and mental health conditions away from the justice system and to appropriate supports.”
- Boost the number of mental health workers to respond to “low-risk emergency calls” and divert people with mental illness and addictions to support, rather than the justice system, and support the hiring of more ethnically diverse police officers.
Greens:
- Increase community safety by investing “significantly in poverty reduction, education, mental and physical health care and ensure everyone has an affordable and safe place to call home.”
- Establish mental health-focused crisis response teams in communities across Ontario — Toronto is already establishing them — to be deployed with people experiencing a mental health or substance-related crisis.
Powers for Toronto
PCs:
- No additional powers for Toronto.
NDP:
- Repeal PC legislation that reduced Toronto council to 25 wards during the 2018 civic election. Tory, however, is focused on pandemic recovery, his spokesperson told the Star, and “it probably isn’t the time to relitigate this (council cut) issue.”
Liberals:
- Take a different approach than the PCs, recognizing that “local leaders know their city best. We’ll take our direction from the city of Toronto on this” council-cut issue.
Greens:
- Increased powers for municipalities including the use of city charters to “prevent inappropriate interference in local democracy by the provincial government.”
- Restore to municipalities the right to hold ranked ballot elections banned by the PC government. Allow municipalities to implement new revenue tools to fund critical infrastructure needs and services.
For more details, read emails to Tory from the PCs, the New Democratsthe Liberals and the Greens.
David Rider is the Star’s City Hall bureau chief and a reporter covering city hall and municipal politics. Follow him on Twitter: @dmrider
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