Toronto 2026 issue

Taxes and Spending

City budgets, services, property taxes, and priorities.

Issue explainer

A plain-language explainer for this issue will appear here once editors add the long description in Payload.

Candidate answers

councillor

Chiara Padovani

What budget priority would you defend for your ward, and what tradeoff would you accept?

My priority is state-of-good-repair funding for our aging community centres and libraries. These are the buildings where seniors cool off in heat waves, kids do homework, and newcomers take language classes, and we've let a repair backlog pile up because ribbon-cuttings win more headlines than roof replacements. The tradeoff I'd accept is deferring new capital projects, including some road expansion work, for two budget cycles. I'd rather maintain what we have than build what we can't afford to keep. This is a update.