Toronto City Budget 2025: What’s good, what we still need.

The City of Toronto staff released the City’s 2025 Budget. Thousands of pages long, this budget sets out billions of dollars in City spending for everything from transit and libraries, to watering plants and trees on City land.

The bottom line.

There's a lot to celebrate in Toronto’s 2025 Budget for the City’s climate and environment. There are new and increased investments that will reduce carbon, improve waste management, and build a city more resilient to extreme climate impacts.

Moving forward, much greater investment is needed to bring these promising initiatives to scale. One of the biggest challenges facing the City is having enough revenue tools to pay for the investments that we need. It’s why TEA, alongside partners like TTCriders and Social Planning Toronto, continue to call for City Council to implement a levy on commercial parking lots in Toronto. This could bring in approximately $150M every year.

Toronto needs more transformative actions and investments in environmental action from all levels of government, investments we know will save residents money, safeguard the environment, and protect the health and well-being of all Torontonians.

Here’s a breakdown of which budget investments we think will help make Toronto a greener city for all, and which investments are still needed.

What's good

IMPROVEMENTS TO TTC, CYCLING INFRASTRUCTURE AND ROAD SAFETY

PROTECTING TORONTONIANS FROM HEAT AND FLOODING

NEW AND SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT FOR DECARBONIZING BUILDINGS

WASTE AND WATER

THE CARBON BUDGET

What Toronto still needs

TORONTO NEEDS A COMMERCIAL PARKING LOT LEVY

TAKING CARE OF TORONTO’S URBAN FOREST — TREE CARE FUNDING

 

What's good

 

IMPROVEMENTS TO TTC, CYCLING INFRASTRUCTURE AND ROAD SAFETY

To cut transportation emissions, Torontonians need options to get around that don’t involve private vehicles or rideshare. Toronto’s short-term goal is to see 75% of all commuting trips be on the sidewalk, by bike, or by transit. The good news in this budget is that there are significant increases in the budgets of the TTC, of the City’s cycling and Bike Share network, and of the Vision Zero road safety network that helps keep pedestrians and cyclists safe.

An additional $85 million is being added to the TTC operating budget that will freeze fares while adding an additional 500,000 service hours to the City’s transit system. The TTC’s long-term capital maintenance budget is also improving, and is slated to cut down the system’s maintenance backlog that’s suffered from over a decade of neglect.

The City’s budget to build cycling infrastructure is also increasing. While it’s unclear at this point if the province will follow through with the removal of the Bloor, Yonge, and University bike lanes, there are still many areas in the City that need better cycling infrastructure. There’s also funding to expand Toronto’s highly successful Bike Share program.

More money is also being invested into Vision Zero, the program designed to bring road fatalities and injuries to zero. Vision Zero’s ten year capital budget is being increased by 53% to $183 million over the next ten years.

Toronto’s vehicle fleet continues its conversion away from gasoline. We’re seeing investment in converting the City’s work vehicles to EVs, electric TTC buses, and shifting waste trucks away from diesel. Over the ten year life span of an EV, each electric vehicle will save over $26,000 in maintenance and fuel costs.

PROTECTING TORONTONIANS FROM HEAT AND FLOODING

Cities around the world are more and more vulnerable to extreme weather events due to climate change, whether this means wildfires, major floods, or heat domes. 

Toronto’s 2025 Budget includes new line items to start addressing the risks and impacts posed by extreme weather. Toronto is creating a $200,000 fund to help vulnerable residents install indoor cooling, which is no longer a luxury in a city seeing increasingly dangerous extreme heat waves. This is something TEA has been pushing for in our work inside the Toronto Heat Safety Coalition. During the 2021 BC heat dome, nearly all fatalities occurred indoors: a pattern seen in communities around the world during extreme heat events. The City is also funding more planning work to protect residents from extreme weather events, including a climate vulnerability assessment. 

The City is also increasing its budget for green streets. These projects add gardens, trees and green spaces along city-owned roads and medians, which helps capture rainwater and prevent flooding, and provides more shade to keep our city cool. Greener streets can absorb more water that would otherwise continue to flood basements and subway tunnels.

NEW AND SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT FOR DECARBONIZING BUILDINGS

The 2025 Budget is placing significant investment into moving buildings away from so-called ‘natural’ gas (responsible for over half of Toronto’s carbon emissions) and towards cleaner technologies like heat pumps.

In addition to continuing the City’s popular low-interest Home Energy Loan Program (HELP), Toronto is creating a new bulk Heat Pump program that will, among other things, help low and moderate-income residents find qualified solar and heat pump installers, and will provide access to financial tools to help households save money by converting them away from fossil gas.

The City is also providing leadership and cutting costs by renovating city-owned buildings to reduce carbon emissions and protect them from extreme weather events, as well as funding for staff to prepare a future Buildings Emissions Performance Standard, which will help all existing buildings across the City cut carbon emissions over time.

WASTE AND WATER

Toronto water and waste rates - the amount residents pay to have their waste collected and their water delivered and removed - had another planned increase this year. This regular increase gives those services the funding to manage important environmental services and plan ahead. 

For example, we’re glad to see things moving along with the much-needed expansion of Toronto’s anaerobic digesters to process our green bin waste which then produces renewable fuel for City trucks.

This budget has funding to develop a number of key waste reduction strategies, including long-term waste diversion, a circular economy plan, and the single-use reduction strategy to cut waste.

THE CARBON BUDGET

In order to reach Net Zero by 2040, we need coordinated action across the City of Toronto. For the first time, every City division is now taking part in the City’s Carbon Budgeting process. While improvements to that process still need to be made, every department is now actively engaged in finding carbon reduction programs in a coordinated fashion.

This is a significant milestone. It was public pressure from TEA and Toronto’s climate activist community that helped to get Toronto’s TransformTO Net Zero plan passed in 2021, and the Carbon Budget passed in 2023. We are now seeing that work propagate throughout City departments and agencies.

 

What Toronto still needs

 

While Budget 2025 reflects important progress in key social and environmental priorities, it’s still not the transformative budget that Toronto needs. In order to address the growing and critical needs of our city, and to start bringing increasing emissions down, Toronto needs long-term revenue solutions from the other levels of government and to use additional revenue tools within its powers.

TORONTO NEEDS A COMMERCIAL PARKING LOT LEVY

Toronto needs more revenue to make large-scale climate improvements, like a world-class, affordable transit system. A levy on large commercial parking lots is a strong tool that Toronto can implement with minimal involvement from other levels of government. 

Commercial Parking Lot Levies are commonly-used revenue generators used by big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Montreal, Vancouver, Sydney, and Melbourne to take some pressure off property taxes and fund important priorities.

A recent City report showed that a Commercial Parking Lot Levy could bring in as much as $150 million every year. For scale, this is equivalent to the amount of revenue Toronto would get from raising residential property taxes by about an additional 3%. This could pay for some huge service improvements to the TTC like making every streetcar across the city arrive in 6 minutes or less, further improving subway frequency, and more. Had Toronto implemented a Commercial Parking Lot Levy in 2016 when reports first came to council, the City could have raised well over one billion additional dollars by now, with a 1-2¢ per hour charge to commercial land owners on spaces in large parking lots.

We expect this tool to come to Council for a decision sometime in 2025 - and we are strongly urging the Mayor and Councillors to implement it as quickly as possible.

TAKING CARE OF TORONTO’S URBAN FOREST — TREE CARE FUNDING

Trees are a vital green infrastructure tool that cool our city, soak up flood water, and provide shade. Last year, TEA supported a motion that would get an additional $0.97 million which helped plant and prune 1,000 extra trees and water 14,000 more trees. However, this extra funding is not returning in the 2025 budget, so we’re asking for the City to add funds to make sure all the new trees being planted get properly watered. It just makes good sense to care for the trees we plant - both financially, and for our future climate. 


Raise YOUR voice on the 2025 Budget

You can speak up in support of critical climate and environmental investments in this year’s budget. Head to this page to find out how you can speak, email, or phone your feedback into this process before the big vote on February 11th.