In 1995, Premier Bob Rae asked Anne Golden to chair a task force on the future of the Greater Toronto Area. The premise was that the region’s quality of life was under threat, that its finances, governance, and transit were no longer keeping up, and that something structural had to change. The report came out in January 1996. This spring, Golden co-edited a book called Saving Toronto: 10 City Builders Tell Us How, and her opening chapter describes the same threats, in the same categories, with the same sense that the city is at a turning point.
I picked up the book for the solutions, and it has plenty. The thirty-year gap between the two documents is what I kept coming back to, because almost none of the diagnosis needed updating.
What the ten authors agree on
The book, published by Dundurn in April, collects essays from Golden, Ken Greenberg, Enid Slack, Josh Matlow, Franz Hartmann, Matti Siemiatycki, Tim Gray, Bianca Wylie, Zahra Ebrahim, and Ilana Altman. Each takes one domain: finances, governance, housing, transportation, the environment, technology, social cohesion, public space. Greenberg’s closing chapter argues that the domains are connected and that the fixes have to be lateral rather than siloed.
The chapters agree with each other more than you would expect from ten people writing separately. Slack describes a city asked to deliver services its revenue tools were never designed to fund. Matlow describes a city whose powers are set, and changed, by a provincial government that can reduce its council mid-election. Hartmann describes a housing shortage he calls self-inflicted, produced by planning rules that favour low-density sprawl and a reliance on the private market for a product it will not build at the bottom of the price range. Siemiatycki describes a region where most people drive because past decisions left them little choice, and where transit reliability has declined while projects slipped. Gray describes the sprawl that the other chapters keep running into, measured in farmland, floodplains, and municipal budgets. Altman describes public space as underfunded relative to how much city building it now has to carry, using the waterfront, the Bentway, and the new Port Lands parks as the examples.
Most of these people have spent decades on their file. When they reach compatible conclusions independently, the diagnosis is probably right, and the interesting question becomes why so little of it has been acted on.
Sorting the list by who can act
The book’s remedies fall into two categories.
The first category needs the province. A city charter that fixes Toronto’s powers so they cannot be rewritten by a single bill. A share of sales tax or another growth-linked revenue source, so that the city stops funding provincial and federal responsibilities out of property tax. City staff put that figure at $1.1 billion a year in 2023. Region-wide road pricing. Enforceable limits on building outward. Every one of these has been recommended before, some of them by Golden’s own task force, and none has been granted. Provinces do not give up control of their largest city voluntarily, and the book does not claim otherwise. It makes the case again because the case is correct, and because the alternative is to stop making it.
The second category the city already controls. Zoning that permits a mix of housing types within the existing built area. Road space reallocated to transit and bikes. Parks and the public realm funded as infrastructure rather than as amenity. Consultation processes that produce decisions. On this category the city’s record is mixed. Council has legalized multiplexes, garden suites, and neighbourhood retail in recent years, and uptake has stayed far below the projections. The city can approve bike lanes and then spend years relitigating them ward by ward. The public realm projects Altman describes as models were mostly delivered through partnerships and waterfront agencies, not through the city’s regular capital process.
Toronto has been slow with the tools it has while waiting for tools it has not been given. The first problem is the city’s own, and it would still be there if the province granted every request in the first category tomorrow.
The friction problem
One chapter complicates the go-faster reading. Bianca Wylie, drawing on Sidewalk Toronto, argues that friction in civic processes is a feature. Slowness is where accountability lives, and a city that streamlines its way past public deliberation hands decisions to whoever can move fastest. Ebrahim’s chapter on social infrastructure makes a related point: the networks that let neighbourhoods absorb shocks are built through patient, repeated contact, not through delivery targets.
I serve on the board of a residents association, and I have watched consultation work both ways. It has caught bad proposals. It has also been the mechanism by which a small number of people delay housing that the city’s own plan calls for. The book leaves this tension open. The distinction that seems workable to me is between friction on the question of what the city should permit, which belongs in the open, and friction on each individual instance of something already permitted, which is where Toronto falls behind. Wylie’s argument is strongest on the first. The housing and transit chapters need the city to stop relitigating the second.
What next?
Greenberg ends with a call to keep showing up. The authors do not have a mechanism for making the province act. These ten authors have spent their careers on these questions, and agree on the direction and a good, detailed list of what needs to change.
Toronto votes on October 26. The provincial category is a test of which candidates will say plainly what they will ask Queen’s Park for and what they will do if the answer is no. The municipal category is a test of whether they will use the powers the city already holds. Thirty years after the first version of this checklist, the diagnosis is clear. What remains open is whether the next mayor and council will act on the parts they have control over, and what they propose to do to overcome the big provincial barrier to real progress.