The year may be new but the biggest challenges facing Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto City Council in 2025 are anything but.
Buying or renting a home is still out of reach for many Torontonians and encampments persist in parks across the city. Travelling around isn’t getting any faster and the battle between Queen’s Park and cyclists is heating up. The city remains responsible for more services than the property tax base can support — barring a massive increase.
While housing, transit and taxes are perpetual issues in city politics — and will play a major role in next year’s council agenda — 2025 will also bring some new problems to councillors’ desks.
Chief among them are federal and provincial elections.
Prime Minister Poilievre
The next federal election is scheduled for Oct. 20, 2025. The odds of the 44th Parliament lasting 10 more months are getting worse by the day.
A Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative government would take a starkly different approach to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals on nearly everything from housing to health care and addictions.
The Liberals’ flagship housing policy is the $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund. It essentially bribes municipalities to make zoning changes to permit denser forms of housing.
Toronto was promised hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years if it lives up to its end up of the deal. If Poilievre wins, he has pledged to quickly scrap the housing fund and institute his own policy that uses more sticks than carrots.
Poilievre’s housing plan would force cities to speed up homebuilding by threatening to withhold federal transit and infrastructure funding.
That could put Toronto in a bind.
Housing starts are expected to remain below targets because interest rates and other financial pressures have caused new home sales — particularly in the condo market — to drop “off a cliff,” according to a presentation by housing expert Marlon Bray at an October industry conference.
Without the cash infusion from pre-construction sales, developers will have a harder time getting approved projects off the ground and will be wary of financing new ones.
That’s bad news for the city, because the economic headwinds for homebuilders could collide with a new government in Ottawa that wants to tie sorely needed federal funding to new construction.
Ford more years
On the provincial side, Premier Doug Ford’s government is widely expected to call an early election and polls point toward four more years of Ford.
Recently, Ford and Chow have been at odds over issues like bike lanes and safe injection sites.
The bike lane removals along Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue aren’t expected to start until next spring at the earliest, according to documents obtained by TorontoToday.
Whenever it happens, the next fight will be where to put replacement bike lanes. The Tories said those lanes and any future bike routes can’t replace existing vehicle traffic lanes, severely limiting the city’s options.
Toronto also has grand plans to build 100 kilometres of new bike lanes over the next three years. That could be put on hold because of Queen’s Park’s new restrictions.
Chow is an avid biker who won lots of votes in neighbourhoods with more cyclists and has made her opposition to the anti-bike lane bill clear. She’s largely kept her powder dry on the issue, saying she’s confident the two sides can come to a win-win compromise.
Provinces, however, have almost all the constitutional power and negotiating from a position of weakness rarely yields favourable results.
Taxes, taxes, taxes
The new year will start with a burst of energy at city hall as budget season kicks off.
The budget committee will meet throughout January and Chow will present her spending package in February.
All eyes will be on her 2025 property tax proposal.
Chow successfully stickhandled the politics of hiking taxes by 9.5 per cent in her last budget — in part by initially proposing a higher increase — but another hike of that heft the year before she is up for re-election will be even more politically challenging.
While Toronto is heading into 2025 in a slightly better financial position than when she took office, the city’s spending pressures haven’t gone away.
The TTC always needs money. Chow has to deliver on housing promises she made during her mayoral campaign. Federal funding for Toronto’s shelters will decline over the next three years. Some city workers need new contracts. Roads and watermains require constant maintenance, and a long list of capital projects require cash.
All signs point to another property tax raise next year — but the closer the city gets to the 2026 mayoral election, the more likely it is that the 2024 increase will be Chow’s biggest.
Housing
Chow has made housing a centrepiece of her mayoralty. In order to get more built, councillors will spend next year determining how high residential developers can build in parts of the city that have mostly been immune to towers.
In November, council approved six to 11-storey apartments “as-of-right” — meaning developers can build to those heights without applying for special approval — on many streets known as “avenues” in the city’s official plan.
The plan could mean significant changes for Bloor Street, College Street and Dundas Street between Lansdowne Avenue and Bathurst Street.
Next year, council could take that decision further.
First, councillors will decide whether to rezone other designated avenues to bring them in line with the November move.
Later in the year, staff will bring forward a proposal to designate more streets as avenues.
If both are approved, it could mean that six to 11-storey buildings will be permitted on far more streets than ever before.
“I cannot underscore enough to members of council how profoundly important and big this change is,” said Etobicoke Centre Coun. Stephen Holyday during debate on the policy at November’s city council meeting.
“There will be some very, very controversial proposals and I think people will find it upsetting to see what council has done.”
The next mayor?
Chow has been mayor for 534 days. She has 668 days until the 2026 mayoral election.
She hasn’t said yet whether she plans to run again, even when asked directly.
Should Chow decide to vie for re-election, the biggest question will be who steps up to challenge her.
Of her 2023 opponents, none have made their intentions public.
Beaches-East York Coun. Brad Bradford is her most vocal critic on council. However, he finished eighth in the last mayoral election, with just over one per cent of the vote, despite the backing of a cadre of political consultants.
Former Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey, who finished fourth in the 2023 election, lost his recent run for council in the Don Valley West byelection.
If he had won the council seat, city hall watchers expected he would use the platform as a launching pad to challenge Chow in 2026.
Chow’s other 2023 challengers, like second-place finisher Ana Bailão, who was backed by ex-mayor John Tory, and third-place former police chief Mark Saunders have stayed out of the political limelight since that election.
Name recognition and incumbency bias go a long way in municipal politics. Chow, like Tory before her, could benefit from those two phenomena should she run again.
If Toronto’s centre-right and right-wing political class coalesce around one candidate, however, it could make the 2026 election a lot more interesting.
