How much of Toronto’s infrastructure is in worse shape than we realize? | TVO Today

Just a few days ago, I made a point of noting the sad demise of the Ontario Science Centre. Years of neglect and underspending on maintenance resulted, late last week, in the sudden and permanent closure of the once-beloved landmark, after engineers warned that some roof panels could collapse this winter under snow weight.

This fits a recent sad theme in my writing here and elsewhere. Over the past few months in particular, and really for the past few years overall, I have probably written more than anything else about our eroding state capacities. Across the board and at every order of government, we seem unable to do things we used to be able to do, at least without extraordinary effort being expended to accomplish fairly ordinary things. No order of government, political party, or even ideology is blameless. The closure of the science centre, in common with the ongoing water woes experienced in Calgary, the overall state of our military and health-care systems, and the truly appalling condition of Toronto’s roads, all came together to present me with yet another opportunity to reflect on just how far we have fallen. And it also encouraged me to do a little bit of math, God help us all.

It was a few weeks ago here that I made note of a recent report breaking down the specific challenges Toronto faces. The Ontario government requires municipalities to provide regular reports on the “state of good repair” of municipally owned public infrastructure. The most recent Toronto numbers were appalling. The city needs to spend $40 billion simply to fix the stuff it already has. Not one solitary cent of it would go to enhancing an existing service or establishing some new service.

That number, $40 billion, is awfully big. So is $14 billion, which is the amount Toronto has actually budgeted. Unfortunately, that leaves Toronto short $26 billion over the next decade. That’s the delta between what we have and what we need.

I’ve been mulling that figure over since I first noted it here last month. It’s important to recall that that is spending required over a decade. In other words, we could help get past some of the sticker shock by thinking of it in terms of $2.6 billion a year for the planned decade of work. That certainly sounds more manageable. But I got curious. How big a hit would that actually put on the city’s finances? As it turns out, an awfully big hit.

I took a look at the publicly available budget figures. The latest budget calls for $17 billion in spending, so immediately making good the spending shortfall would mean (roughly, as I’m rounding off the numbers for simplicity) an additional 15 per cent in spending. Toronto expects to raise $5.3 billion in residential-property taxes this year. Remember, we’re short $2.6 billion. We’d have to raise residential-property taxes by 50 per cent immediately to come up with the necessary bucks. We would then need to keep property taxes there — and, in fact, continually adjust them upward with inflation — for the next decade.

Do you recall how grumpy everyone was when it was reported that Mayor Olivia Chow’s first budget would involve a double-digit property-tax increase? Do you remember how pleased the mayor and her key officials seemed to be when they were able to bring out a figure that was slightly below the double-digit marker, with all that entails psychologically?

Well! Take that original, eye-popping figure, ramp it up 500 per cent, and sustain that new level for an entire decade. That is what Toronto needs to do.

More fairly, that’s one thing Toronto could do. It is even what I would encourage Toronto to do, though I am fully aware this would make me pretty unpopular with my neighbours, all 3 million of them. What Toronto will actually undoubtedly do is more of what it has already been doing: beg higher orders of government for cash to make up the difference between what it plans to spend on upkeep and what it actually needs to spend.

I don’t think that’s a great idea in the long run. I’d rather not be at the mercy of any provincial or federal official who may see electoral benefits in telling Toronto to, in the famous words of one newspaper headline, drop dead. But no one at city hall asked my opinion, so on top of further property-tax hikes, I expect to see the Toronto government seeking more and more help from the province and from Ottawa.

I also think it’ll get some of that help. I was very impressed by the political stickhandling demonstrated by Chow in wringing as much money and as many concessions out of Doug Ford as she did. I suspect there remain a few further rabbits in her hat that she could pull out and wow us all with.

But I also keep thinking about Calgary. Work to restore the city’s municipal water system is proceeding. Spare parts have arrived. And further inspections of the water system have discovered no urgent issues beyond the ones the city is already seeking to correct.

So that’s good. But I can’t help but dwell on the fact that, right until the moment the Calgary water main went kablooey, as far as the city knew, it was in a reasonably good state of repair. So, and I confess we’re thinking the dark thoughts here, how much of the infrastructure in Toronto and in other cities across the province and country is actually in much worse shape than we appreciate? What if it’s not $40 billion over the next decade just to hold the line in Toronto? What if it’s a lot more than that and a lot sooner than that and at a pretty unpredictable rate? What if stuff just starts breaking?

I hope it doesn’t. I’m not trying to be needlessly pessimistic. But all the evidence Toronto has is that we already own a lot of stuff that is in pretty bad condition. That’s why we need $40 billion now, to begin fixing it.

This is not a wonderful place to be. Some of the stuff that fails may fail in a way that directly affects quality of life. God forbid, it could fail in a way that threatens life itself.

We have painted ourselves into a real corner here. What happened in Calgary and at the science centre ought to be seen as relatively pain-free warning shots across our bow. It should spark a conversation about why we need to begin aggressively fixing our infrastructure, while also aggressively working to build the new, necessary infrastructure we’ve fallen behind in building.

I have a feeling it won’t spark that kind of dialogue, at least until something critical breaks in a spectacular way. But consider this my official invitation, to both our elected officials and the voting public at large, to prove me wrong.

Please, please. Prove me wrong.