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Toronto could spend $100M to fight poverty in 2016
The city’s final report on a sweeping plan to tackle growing inequality and lack of opportunity in Toronto, released Tuesday, will be debated at council’s executive committee Oct. 20.

thestar.com
Oct. 14, 2015
By Laurie Monsebraaten

Toronto could invest as much as $100 million to fight poverty in 2016 as part of a new effort to bring prosperity to all residents, says the city councillor leading the charge.

“We’ve cobbled together many sources of money,” said Deputy Mayor Pam McConnell, appointed earlier this year by Mayor John Tory to craft a 20-year poverty reduction strategy for the city.

“Some of that has been federal-provincial money, a reallocation of (city) budgets and some may be new money,” she said in an interview.

The city’s final report on a sweeping plan to tackle growing inequality and lack of opportunity in Toronto, released Tuesday, will be debated at council’s executive committee Oct. 20. The strategy, entitled TO Prosperity, is expected to go before city council for final approval in November.

Detailed funding for next year’s poverty-busting efforts will be proposed when City Manager Peter Wallace presents the 2016 budget in December.

But some of the funding plans are already known.

Almost $40 million from Ottawa and Queen’s Park is earmarked in 2016 for affordable housing initiatives, says Wallace’s report that accompanies the strategy.

The city’s 10-year capital budget includes another $10 million in energy retrofits for older apartment buildings, social infrastructure in high-needs neighbourhoods and renovation of an under-used public housing building to accommodate women and children, the report adds.

The remaining $50 million would come from McConnell’s “hope and expectation” that the city doubles its 2015 spending on poverty reduction.

Last year’s budget allocated $26.1 million for free transit for children under 12, new shelter beds for women and LGBT youth, more student nutrition programs, after-school programs and child-care subsidies.

“We should be able to get close to doubling that amount of money for 2016,” McConnell said.

The strategy’s 2016 work plan anticipates new city funding to keep libraries open on Sundays in neighbourhood improvement areas; further expand student nutrition programs; increase youth employment initiatives and assist vulnerable seniors with more homemaker and nursing services.

“A snapshot has emerged in recent years of a city unfairly and unjustly divided by income, class and geography,” Tory writes in the forward to the strategy. “(A)cting on this strategy is the only way to live up to our values as Canadians and our commitment to build a prosperous and fair city for all.”

The 62-page report, which fine-tunes the city’s interim strategy, released in June, includes 17 recommendations and 71 actions “to advance equity, opportunity and prosperity for all Toronto residents.”

The final report also features 17 measurement tools or “indicators” to track progress on the strategy’s six areas for action, including housing stability, access to services, transit equity, access to healthy food, quality jobs with livable incomes and systemic change.

Indicators include:

The report’s 20-year framework calls on city staff to produce annual work plans and four-year “term action plans.” Progress reports at the end of each year and term of council will hold politicians to account, McConnell said.

“The goal is to make this part of the city’s DNA,” she said. “Staff come and go. Councillors come and go. But poverty continues. So you need to have a framework and a road map that outlives everyone.”

The report also recommends the creation of an “accountability table” to help monitor the strategy’s implementation and effectiveness. Membership would be drawn from community groups, residents, business, labour, academia, funding institutions as well as individuals living in poverty.

McConnell praised “the thousands” of community members living in poverty who helped craft the plan during more than 100 meetings and through more than 600 online questionnaires over the past year.

“That’s a dialogue we need to continue to foster,” she said. “The people who are the experts in poverty are really the people who have lived it.”

Who is poor in Toronto by the numbers