Provincial Overreach and Toronto’s Infrastructure - by Councillor Dianne Saxe, seconded by Councillor Amber Morley

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.