Social Planning Toronto has drafted a letter calling on the Mayor and City Council to immediately invest in urgent community services in the 2023 City Budget. We are reaching out to community-based organizations and workers to sign on to the letter, as individuals and as organizations. On February 15th the signed letter will be both emailed to Council members and presented at the Have a Heart City Budget Rally outside of Toronto City Hall. Please sign on to the letter and join us on Feb 15th at 9am!

Deadline to sign: February 14th at 2pm

_____________________________________________________________________________

Mayor John Tory and City Councillors,

We, ### organizations and ### workers, working across multiple sectors and neighbourhoods in Toronto, urge you to listen to the tens of thousands of Toronto residents, doctors, community groups, and advocates who are calling for a better city for all and a better budget that will get us there. 

So many people are feeling a sense of desperation as they try to live out their lives in this city with dignity. So many have urged you to address the multiple and urgent crises facing us — homelessness, unaffordable housing, food insecurity and poverty, violence in all its forms, opioid poisoning, and a climate emergency. And so many have pleaded with you to prioritize those most impacted by the pandemic and inequitable systems, whose lives are at risk right now. Torontonians are feeling like you are not listening. 

What we see is a budget that prioritizes policing and security over the services, supports and good jobs that we know increase community safety, health, and wellbeing. It’s not too late to make better choices to build the city we desperately need.

Many of our community partners have been ringing the alarm bells on this year’s budget. We join them in their calls for increased funding for supports for unhoused individuals; the creation of new affordable housing; renter protections; expansion of community crisis response pilot projects; increased funding for and access to public transit (including a stop to TTC cuts). 

As community-based organizations, advocates, and workers, we also call on you to support funding for urgent community needs in this year’s budget:

1. Increase investments in urgently needed community services.

2. Take immediate action to prevent homeless deaths & invest in measures to reduce homelessness.

3. Take critical action to prevent and address poverty, inequality, and systemic injustice.

Frontline agencies delivering community services, including those supported by the Community Partnership Investment Program (CPIP), are the City’s best resource for providing local solutions to critical challenges — increasing safety and well-being, preventing violence, keeping people housed, addressing poverty, increasing social cohesion, and enabling access to critical services and vaccines throughout the pandemic. CPIP funding supports organizations to deliver services that connect communities and make our neighbourhoods safer and more livable by supporting newcomers, youth, seniors, families, low-income individuals, racialized communities, and underhoused residents. In a time of crisis, we need to boost the resources of local community agencies, and the supports they provide, not diminish them.

The budget freeze for nonprofits is especially detrimental to a sector that has stepped up in the pandemic, but is dealing with increased service demands while also struggling with staff burnout, inflationary costs, and funding envelopes that aren’t enough to pay living wages to many of its workers. 

We call for:

• An inflationary increase of 6.6% for all community agencies that receive funding from the City of Toronto, including through CPIP, Toronto Arts Council, Shelter Support and Housing Administration, and others; 

• An overall increase to CPIP funding to address the chronic underfunding of community services and expand support for Indigenous-led and Black-mandated organizations and resident leadership initiatives; 

• An increase in funding for community groups focused on violence prevention and alternative, community-based solutions to address violence, including expanding the community crisis response pilots; and

• An increase in funding for harm reduction programs, including support for the outreach overdose team and mobile supervised consumption service.

Hundreds of residents and organizations from across sectors including community organizations, faith leaders and health care professionals, are deeply concerned about the failure of this budget to respond to our most immediate and urgent crisis — the homelessness crisis. Our shelter system is over capacity and shelter workers must turn people away every night in the winter, while homeless deaths continue to increase at an alarming rate. This past week, Toronto City Council voted against opening warming centres 24/7 that would allow unhoused people a safe, warm place to stay through the winter, despite the Ontario Human Rights Commission reminding the City  of this basic responsibility. 

We must take significant steps to prevent further homelessness, protect renters, increase grants and RGI subsidies for low-income residents, and build upon initiatives that can rapidly create new affordable housing options.

We call for:

• 24/7 indoor warming locations open until April 2023, including warming centres provided by the City of Toronto and by community organizations and faith-based groups, that would provide low-barrier, walk-in access to people in need of a safe place to spend the night; 

• Increased funding for Toronto’s 50+ drop-in centres — operated by community organizations that are the backbone of the homelessness support and service sector;

• Protections for renters and prevention of homelessness by significantly increasing funds for the successful Eviction Prevention in the Community (EPIC) and Rent Bank grants to adequately match the level of need in communities (in 2023, EPIC will only help 1,200 households and the Rent Bank will only help 2,400); and

• Increased Rent-Geared-to-Income subsidies to make a significant reduction to the more-than 81,000 households that are on the social housing waiting list, with an average wait time from 8 to 15 years. The draft budget proposes less than a 1% increase to its RGI subsidy program over the 2022 target.

Every level of government has a role to play in reducing poverty and addressing inequality and injustice. Toronto City Council took a significant step forward in 2016 when it approved the poverty reduction strategy. We have also seen other important equity strategies and priorities brought forward such as the Confronting Anti-Black Racism Strategy (CABR), Newcomer Strategy, Youth Equity Strategy, and this year we expect to see the City’s first Gender Equity Strategy. These strategies all require resources to ensure successful outcomes.

Last year, the City introduced its first Reconciliation Action Plan. This is an important step on the path to reconciliation, but without funding and appropriate staffing, Toronto will fall behind on its commitments.

We call for:

• Increased investments in the Poverty Reduction Strategy, including fully funding and implementing the Fair Pass program;

• Full funding and implementation of critical equity strategies, including CABR, newcomer, youth, seniors and other equity initiatives;

• Increased resources for the Gender Equity Office to finalize the City’s first Gender Equity Strategy and implementation plan; and

• Full funding and appropriate staffing to fully implement the City’s Reconciliation Action Plan.

We know that the City of Toronto is limited in its financial resources, and so we are pleased to see that there is an openness to create a sustainable long-term financial plan that will increase the options for revenue generation. While we await staff reports and consider the longer-term options, we urge you to maximize existing revenue tools in the short-term, including an increase to the Municipal Land Transfer Tax rates for luxury homes and increasing the Vacant Homes Tax to 5% as the City of Vancouver has done. 

Finally, we echo our calls from 2022 for a more transparent and democratic budget process. This year’s budget process involved the shortest timelines we have seen in recent years, making it challenging for the public to provide informed input for the City Council’s budget decisions. Given what is at stake, it is crucial for residents to meaningfully engage in the budget process.

We call for the Mayor and City Council to:

• Determine budget needs before setting the tax-supported budget;  

• Align budget documents with plans, strategies, and commitments for transparency;  

• Implement a renewed and improved equity-responsive budgeting process, strengthen the inclusion of community voices to inform equity analyses and budget decisions, and apply a strong intersectional gender equity approach; 

• Meaningfully assess the impacts of budget decisions on Indigenous communities and groups across all divisions; and

• Allow residents and communities to shape the budget from the planning stage to the final vote at Council, including those most impacted by inequitable systems and policies and those that work with them.

We can do better. We all need and deserve better. Lives are at stake. We are counting on you. Please listen to communities and make better choices that will work for all of us.

Signed,

[Note: both workers and organizations are encouraged to sign this open letter. If you are signing on behalf of an organization, please ensure you have the authority to do so. We will not share or display the email addresses of respondents; they are being collected to confirm the identity of respondents and to update contact information in our records.  On February 15th the signed letter will be both emailed to Council members and the City Clerk ].