Item - 2024.MM23.14

Councillor Dianne Saxe, seconded by Councillor Amber Morley recommends that:

1. City Council direct the City Manager to write to the Premier of Ontario and to all Ontario municipalities protesting the overreach in Bill 212 and asking the Province to respect municipalities’ jurisdiction to manage competing claims for its own infrastructure and to withdraw the proposed section 195.2 of the Highway Traffic Act.

Toronto, with a population of 2,794,356 in 2021, is the fourth-most populous city in North America. Our population, our economy and our government are larger than those of every Canadian province except British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and Ontario.

Toronto is an international centre of business, finance, arts, sports, and culture and is one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world. Toronto is the economic engine of Ontario, providing a large subsidy every year to other parts of the province, as well as to other parts of Canada. Toronto provides a disproportionately large share of the revenue of the provincial government.

City Councillors are the closest level of government to our constituents, and most reliably represent the interests of local residents and businesses. The City of Toronto owns, pays for, maintains and operates most of the infrastructure that allows this goose to lay its golden eggs, in an environment of overwhelming and competing demands. Managing and allocating this public infrastructure so as to appropriately balance these competing demands is a central function of municipal government, and essential to allow us to do the jobs we were elected to do.

With Bill 23, Doug Ford took hundreds of millions of dollars out of the city’s infrastructure budget each year; he has not kept his promise to keep the City whole. This has drastically undercut the City’s ability to provide and maintain our infrastructure. Bill 212 is yet another overreaching attack on the people of Toronto, proposing to wastefully tear up millions of dollars of newly constructed roads, in order to distort how Toronto Council balances competing demands for street space, climate action, affordability, road safety, tree cover and quality of life.