Opinion: How can Toronto get back on track?

Matti Siemiatycki is professor of geography and planning and director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.

Now here’s a cheerleading slogan to put on a T-shirt: “We’re number 82!”

According to a recent ranking by The Globe and Mail, Toronto is amongst the least livable cities in Canada, 82nd on the list. But at first blush, it seems easy to dismiss the results. Is it really possible that the country’s largest city, which was ranked as the 12th most livable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2024, is actually a bad place to live? That Taylor Swift blundered in making Toronto among the cities that hosted the most concerts over her worldwide Eras Tour? Or that Nobel Prize winner and AI innovator Geoffrey Hinton got it all wrong when he decided to anchor his career in Toronto?

Rankings by their nature are imperfect. But they can also serve as a warning signal. And in the case of Toronto, at least, it would be a mistake to dismiss the findings out of hand.

The Globe’s ranking is just the most recent callout of the challenges facing Toronto. The picture isn’t pretty, and it’s shaping how its residents experience the city. From living standards to infrastructure, housing and the economy, Toronto is falling behind.

Toronto recently ranked as having the third-slowest traffic in the world, and the 11th least affordable housing among 94 cities in eight countries. The downtown core’s recovery as a business hub in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has lagged behind its North American peer cities.

The numbers and depths of poverty being experienced in Toronto are also greater than ever. Today, nearly 11,000 people are homeless. Tent encampments dot the city’s parks and roadsides. Food-bank usage is at an all-time high.

It’s all a bad combination for urban livability.

Toronto’s physical and social infrastructure needs serious help. The 2024 city budget projected that its backlog of work upkeeping municipal assets would surge in cost to $22.7-billion in unfunded deferred maintenance by 2033, with much of it affecting the city’s aging transit system, which has led to increasingly frequent breakdowns. The Toronto District School Board has a $4.2-billion maintenance backlog of its own as of last year. Insufficient funds have delayed construction of emergency housing.

This massive backlog of necessary investments didn’t just happen overnight. Municipal taxes had intentionally been kept low in the city for a decade; the bill has now come due.

But so has recognition of the problem, and this is the city’s best hope for a rebound. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow was elected on a platform previously conceived as unwinnable: a promise to raise taxes to improve municipal infrastructure and services. Now that the taxes and fees have gone up, people want to see the efficient delivery of improved services.

But even this can cause short-term pain. With construction and repairs seemingly everywhere, traffic gridlock and frustration worsen.

Provincial policies haven’t helped. It’s telling that while 39 per cent of Canada’s population lives in Ontario, its municipalities account for only 27 per cent of The Globe’s top 100 most livable cities in the country. In Toronto’s case, the province has harmed the city over the years through alternating instances of micromanagement, recklessness and, worst of all, mismanagement of overdue major light-rail transit projects.

Torontonians’ resulting frustrations are now being channeled into a series of heated culture-war debates about bike lanes, safe injection sites, public disorder and neighbourhood intensification, with this discourse often devoid of evidence.

At the same time, middle-income Torontonians and young people are also finding it increasingly difficult to see a long-term future for themselves in the city. In 2023, tens of thousands more people left Toronto for other parts of Ontario than arrived, including many young families with children – exactly the type of people a city needs to thrive.

Of course, it’s easy to assail Toronto for all its current challenges. It would be equally easy to list all the things that are great about it, and its bright future ahead. As a born-and-raised Torontonian who loves this city, this is an argument that I often make.

But it’s clear that the emergency light is flashing.

What Toronto needs is a redoubling of efforts on the boring but critical task of funding and efficiently rehabilitating the city’s infrastructure. It’s time for a wartime-level campaign that’s focused on building more housing of all types, in neighbourhoods with the full range of amenities needed make them truly livable.

And while I’m asking for things: A Stanley Cup win for the Maple Leafs wouldn’t hurt the city’s spirit, either.