Toronto isfallingapart.

Toronto residents are struggling with the cost of living. While City Hall doesn’t control every factor driving affordability, Chow’s policies directly increase the cost of owning or renting a home, commuting and running a business.

Taxing Toronto to death

A whopping 19.6% cumulative property tax increase in just three years: the largest since amalgamation. Plus, a tripled Vacant Home Tax, a new luxury home tax, and rising water, garbage and commercial property taxes.

Chow promised “modest” tax increases in her 2023 campaign. Toronto homeowners got some of the largest increases in decades, including a 9.5% increase in 2024 alone (the largest tax increase in 25 years). On September 4, 2026, she pledged to keep future increases “at or around” inflation. Is she to be trusted?

Spending more, delivering less

Toronto’s operating budget has ballooned to $18.9 billion while taxpayers face:

• 800 additional municipal hires and a growing permanent payroll, largely staffed with bureaucrats sympathetic to far-left causes and radical political organizations, such as Progress Toronto.
• Overtime costs have soared to $134.2 million.
• Sick-leave costs have reached $131.9 million.
• Millions drained from reserves to fund ongoing programs.

Housing: less supply, more pressure

Toronto housing starts plunged 31% in 2025 compared with 2024. By mid-2026, population-adjusted starts had fallen to among their lowest levels since 1996.

At a time when Toronto desperately needs more homes, construction is moving in the wrong direction.

Wasteful spending, everywhere

While residents are squeezed, City Hall has spent millions on questionable priorities:

• Sankofa Square rebranding: Costs projected to reach $860,000.
• Dundas renaming: Millions spent on rebranding city assets.
• Unused software: $11 million wasted on licenses for employees who no longer needed them.
• Traffic wardens and cosmetic fixes: Millions spent on visible stopgaps while congestion, infrastructure delays and maintenance backlogs persist.
• Homelessness and shelters: nearly $1 billion spent annually, mostly going to unaccountable non-profits and with over $150 million to bureaucratic salaries and benefits.

The bottom line

Chow keeps asking Toronto residents to pay more—while City Hall spends more, drains reserves and struggles to deliver the basics.

Affordability isn’t just about what things cost. It’s about how much City Hall takes from your household—and what you get in return.

Millions of dollars in drug paraphernalia. Record levels of disorder. Where is the accountability?

Between 2021 and 2025, Toronto distributed 2.34 million meth pipes, 3.45 million crack pipes and 14.92 million syringes—much of it branded with the City’s own logo.

That’s nearly 700,000 crack pipes, almost half a million meth pipes and close to 3 million syringes every year.

Despite years of expanded harm-reduction programs and safe-consumption sites, Toronto continues to face a devastating opioid crisis. Meanwhile, residents have watched public drug use, discarded needles and pipes, and visible street disorder become an increasingly disturbing part of daily life.

Following the Province’s decision to withdraw funding from certain supervised consumption sites and shift its approach toward treatment and recovery, Ontario reported a significant decline in opioid-related deaths. That decline raises serious questions about the direction Toronto’s harm-reduction strategy has taken. This issue is inseparable from the billion-dollar homeless shelter boondoggle.

Mayor Olivia Chow opposed the Province’s changes. She also supported decriminalizing all drugs, asking the federal government to exempt Toronto from Canada’s drug laws.

Our streets are not treatment centers. Our sidewalks are not injection sites.

And residents should not have to navigate a city that increasingly resembles Zombieland.

Compassion must include treatment, recovery and safer public spaces—not an endless supply of drug paraphernalia and a willingness to accept public disorder as the new normal.