Kristina Kennedy does what she can to stretch the family budget.
The 41-year-old mother of four is on a fixed income. She receives disability support and child tax benefits, but after paying the bills and the rent for her apartment in the Woodbine Corridor, she’s left with only about $200 a week for groceries for herself and her four kids.
She walks places to avoid paying for the TTC. She uses apps to find out when grocery stores are selling soon-to-expire food at a discount. But sometimes it’s not enough.
“I try to be creative, but … at a certain point, it’s just not feasible,” she said.
Kennedy turns to the local food bank to fill the gaps. She’s hardly alone. One in 10 Toronto residents rely on food donations, according to the Daily Bread Food Bank, and there were 4.1 million visits to city food banks last year.
It’s a situation Kennedy never expected to be in, but after complications from the birth of her son in 2013 left her disabled, and the death of her husband about four years later, she was in a tough position.
“It honestly is shocking how easy it can happen to you,” she said.
How quickly affordability falls apart
In Toronto, the line between getting by and not having enough is razor thin. That affordability crunch is top of mind for voters heading into the Oct. 26 municipal election, and while the main candidates both agree cost of living is a major issue, they have very different ideas about how to address the problem.
Both Brad Bradford and Olivia Chow have plans to build more affordable homes — housing costs are the main driver of Toronto’s affordability woes — but they have spent much of the campaign highlighting more immediate plans to save residents money.
While Bradford is pitching measures that would cut homeowners’ costs by thousands of dollars, Olivia Chow is proposing more modest policies aimed at reducing bills for lower-income families. As much as any other policy area, the two candidates’ approach to pocketbook issues illustrates their different visions for the role of city government, and the choice facing voters next week.
Two very different plans for Toronto’s wallet
Bradford, the outgoing councillor for Beaches—East York, says his campaign is about “real affordability measures that are going to make a big difference in people’s lives.”
In September, he announced he would freeze property taxes in his first year (he has since said he would maintain the 1.5 per cent annual increase for Toronto’s city building fund, which pays for housing and transit infrastructure). If re-elected, Chow has said she would keep property tax increases “at or around” the rate of inflation.
Bradford has also pledged to expand the municipal land transfer tax rebate to eliminate the charge on homes sold for below the city average, which last year was about $1.1 million. He estimates the policy would save first-time homebuyers and those moving within Toronto up to $18,000 each, and would help “restore the dream of home ownership.”
He is also promising to reduce water bills by about $300 a year by creating a new public water utility.
The councillor argues his policies to reduce homeowners’ bills would also benefit renters, because landlords pass on increased costs like taxes and utilities to their tenants by raising rents.
Chow and other critics have questioned whether Bradford can pay for his affordability promises without cutting services — the land transfer tax cut would cost the city $300 million annually — and claim his utility proposal opens the door to privatizing the water supply — an accusation he denies.
But Noah Jarvis, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation, predicted Bradford’s ideas would improve affordability. A recent Ipsos poll shows a majority of nonhomeowners in Toronto don’t believe they will ever afford to buy in the city. “Any policy that seeks to reduce that cost for prospective homebuyers” is “a great thing,” Jarvis said.
However, Don Drummond, the Stauffer-Dunning Fellow at Queen’s University and former chief economist for TD Bank, cautioned that any savings from Bradford’s expanded rebate could quickly be offset by higher home prices. Removing the tax would encourage more buyers to enter the market, which would increase demand for limited housing supply. “You actually put more pressure on house prices to go up,” he said.
Instead of floating new ideas, the incumbent mayor has mostly promised to build on policies from her first term that she says have lowered costs for the city’s vulnerable.
Central to Chow’s platform is the city’s school nutrition program, which provides mid-morning snacks to more than 300,000 students. She wants to expand it to also provide lunch, which she says would save families $1,800 per child per year.
Chow would also put a weekly cap on transit fares, meaning riders would pay for 10 trips per week, after which they would ride free. The initiative piggybacks on the 47-ride monthly fare cap the TTC implemented last month, and Chow says the new policy would save commuters who take three additional weekly round trips $19.80 per week.
Both Chow and Bradford have said they wouldn’t increase fares next year.
Chow has also announced she would provide more free recreational programming, and rein in grocery bills by passing a bylaw to prohibit surveillance pricing. However, it’s not clear whether the city has the power to ban the practice, under which retailers use personal data to raise prices for individual shoppers, and industry groups say it’s not being widely used in Canada.
By dollar amount, Chow’s proposals would likely save individual residents less than Bradford’s plans. That, and the fact her promises are largely initiatives council advanced in her first term, has opened her up to criticism from her rival that she’s “out of ideas on affordability.”
But she insists her giving kids a free meal or keeping transit affordable could prevent a low-income family from having to choose between missing rent or giving their children a proper meal. “That’s actual dollars for these folks so that their life is a bit better,” she said last week.
Both affordability plans come with a cost
Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, said Bradford is courting people who own or hope to own a home, while Chow is “looking at how difficult it is to raise young children if you don’t have a great job” and can’t afford a house or a car.
Yalnizyan said Chow’s approach is more beneficial for Toronto’s many newcomers and those living in poverty, and expanding the school meal program would “improve the futures of all of our residents, including our youngest neighbours.”
Both Chow and Bradford’s policies come at a cost however, and given the city’s inability to run a deficit, they could lead to higher bills for some residents now or in the future, according to Drummond. For example, Chow’s weekly fare cap would cost the TTC more than $30 million per year when fully implemented, and to make up for that lost revenue the city might have to raise taxes, or reduce funding for other programs, Drummond warned.
Kennedy, the Woodbine mom, wants whoever is elected mayor next week to commit to hiring advisors who know what it’s like to struggle with affordability. People like her are experts in figuring out which supports work and which don’t, because “we’ve been doing it for years,” she said.
“A big part of what’s missing” from policy-making “is the human experience,” she said.
Kennedy says she’d be happy to lend the next mayor her expertise.
“I would like to see this (situation) be made better for everybody and I think a lot of other people would be happy to help as well.”
