Bleak. This is probably the single most important urban realm project in the city right now.
I'm still completely lost as to how every other large city in the country has better finances than Toronto. Where is all the money being spent? Sprawling road maintenance? Police budget? Taking on provincial responsibilities? Overstaffing city hall?
There certainly are some questionable spending decisions at times. I've harped a on few over the years. That said, for the most part, they involve millions, not tens or hundreds of millions.
With some exceptions, the program decisions that are questionable would free up some much needed money on the operations side, but hardly make a dent on the capital budget side.
On the capital side there are few overlapping issues.
1) The manner in which projects are financed and parceled (phased projects that shouldn't be, and where accretive costs are added as a result)
2) Procurement issues. There are lots of those. Too few bidders, too few good bidders, poor project oversight, no real penalty for contractors or project managers that screw up.
3) Insufficient money, because taxes were held just a bit too low, but for quite a long time. Lets just imagine (I'm picking a number here, not doing the exact math) that you fall behind 2% per year in capital spending because of insufficient revenues.
Imagine you've done that every single year since 1998. 24 years, x 2 % would cleaning equal being 48% behind where you should be; but its actually a bit worse, because when small maintenance is deferred, it often becomes much more expensive large maintenance.
4) One more thing, because of City decisions, but also provincial and federal ones, you have obligations piling up that previously didn't exist or at least not at the scale they do now; and which are being met in expensive, short-term solution ways, rather than permanent, cost-effective ones.
See the Federal government handing off lots of refugees all of a sudden to the City, without funding to house or feed them. Equally, the number of homeless shelter beds in the City 6 years ago was ~4500; today its over 9000 and set to grow to over 10,000 in coming 12 months.
The capital and operating obligations of housing an extra 6,000 people are huge.
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For comparison, this is less of an issue in Quebec because housing cheaper, social benefits more generous and affordable housing, while also insufficient is nonetheless in greater relative supply than here. BC has a social assistance rate that is far higher as well, paying a floor of about ~$1100 a month vs Ontario's $733.
Even stingy Alberta treats its seriously disabled better. Their program is called AISH and it provides up to $1,863 per month; where ODSP is just over $1,300; all that while housing in Edmonton and Calgary is considerably cheaper than Toronto.
docs.google.com
Seriously - the problems and direction are self-evident.
