The Ben Mulroney Show - Chow to feds -- pay up or I'm raising taxes in Toronto! (and homeowners weep)

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

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Property taxes have been going up and we haven't seen a commensurate rise in services in this city. We've been paying more and we haven't been getting anything out on the other end. And the conclusion that a lot of us reached was because, we have this new added aspect to life in the city which is tending to arise in the number of refugees and I've said many times before a city like Toronto you know how you know the character of this city based on how

we we take care of those who are the most vulnerable and there is no one more vulnerable than a refugee someone who comes from another country who does not speak the language with no connection to the city they need us as much much as, if not more, than anyone else. So, of course, unless you have a heart made of stone, you want to make sure that those who come here fleeing oppression, fleeing war, fleeing fear for their lives, have a place where they can feel safe.

And that burden is ours to carry. And in a lot of ways, it is our honor to carry. But the system is increasingly becoming untenable. reminder. Taxes have risen 17.4% over the last a few years. And we are facing a massive budget shortfall because the money that's supposed to come from the feds is being cut off what today? I think it's $104 million. That ends, I believe, later today. Here is Olivia Chow telling us that the rubber is meeting the road. Oh, we don't have that. Oh, I'm sorry, I apologize.

So, yeah, she's essentially saying, look, the feds aren't paying, so somebody's going to have to pay, and it's going to have to come in the form of the taxpayer. And she's essentially saying you can expect property tax to go up 2%. Now, here's the big picture. As of April 2025, the city of Toronto said there are more than 10,000, 10,000 people being housed in shelters and hotels. And about 47% of those are asylum seekers. For the average night, the city shelters have approximately just over 4,000 people, refugee claimants, asylum seekers in Toronto system.

And as of a March report, that was up from 2,300 at the start of the pandemic. So, you know, almost doubled. Let's talk about this federal shortfall. Ottawa's latest offer leaves Toronto $107 million short in funding for refugee claimants and asylum seekers, despite the federal role. in refugee processing. That's a really nice way of putting it. The only people in charge of inviting people into the country saying,

come here, we can take care of you, is the feds. They opened the doors and they said, we have the capacity, we have the bandwidth to help you. Come here for a better life. And what have they done? They've abandoned cities like Toronto. So the total funding gap, if you combine with the $46 million ask from the province, Toronto now faces $153 million shortfall in 2025.

Oh, do we have the audio now? Let's listen to our mayor. The city is facing two funding cuts that threatens our ability to bring people off the streets, out of encampments, and into shelters and homes. We have been providing shelter to people who arrive to Toronto fleeing, violence, war and persecution, but now the federal government won't pay their bills. for the service. The city is short by $107 million. We can either stop sheltering refugees claimants, leave them on the street, which will make homelessness worse, reversing the progress we made

on reducing the number of encampments. Or Torontoians will have to pay for it through their property taxes. Neither is fair. She's not wrong. She's not wrong. I've sort of been trying to figure out how, where I assign blame. And for me, it's about a 20, it's an 80, 20 split. The 20% is reserved for Olivia Chow and her godawful spending priorities over the past few years. And 80% of it, 80% of my frustration is geared towards the feds who have, who opened the doors. They said that we were, we were, we could welcome the world and we do not have the

bandwidth to do so. and imagine being somebody fleeing persecution, fleeing fear, fleeing for their lives, and coming to a place and being told, yeah, either you're in a shelter, you're on the streets in the middle of winter. It would make you reconsider the choice. It would make you ask yourself, did Canada lie to me? And I don't like being a liar to anybody. And that is our shame to carry.

Okay, so here's the problem as I see it. the city unfortunately is terrible at running shelters with about 150,000 people, just over 15,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto. That was in October of 2024. If you divide Toronto's $787 million operating budget by the number, that gives us approximately $51,000 per person per year for homelessness services. We spend $50,000 per person who's experiencing homelessness. Now, the city plan is to build more shelters.

Here's the cost. Each shelter proposed has a $34 million budget. $34 million at about 50 to 80 beds per shelter. So for an example, the third street shelter, that's going to have 50 beds. At $680K per bed per resident. Two beds in each kind of room, tiny room. That's $1.36 million per cell. I'm telling you that the city, if they wanted to, could buy a tiny condo for each one of these people.

Like, why not at market value? Just buy it out right with cash. Look what they're buying selling in Yorkville. There are condos for $629,000, $630,000. We're spending $1.36 million per sell. Let's call it a sell. You could buy a condo in Yorkville for that, for, you could buy two condos for that cost. Even the Dufferin Grove people would be happy with that.

Yes. It's moving. ready. One to two beds plus a den. The Dufferin Grove people would love this, although they would want options. So this is the problem. This is where we are. The feds opened the doors, opened the gates, want to show the world how wonderful Canada was, how magnanimous we were, how open, how big our hearts were. And yes, our hearts are big. But if we don't have the ability to care for you, then it's irresponsibility to the highest order. And then when you turn off the taps because the feds are now realizing they have a cash

crunch, but they're the ones who let everybody in. It then falls to the city to care for these people. The feds don't have to do it. And so they promise a certain amount of money and they've turned that money off. So where are you going to get the money from now? Let's not forget, the money from the feds comes from the taxpayer. And now Olivia Chow is saying that in order to take care of these people. She's got to come

two of the taxpayers. There's only one taxpayer. You and me. That's it. They keep coming to us for a pound of flesh. I don't have any flesh left. Like the flesh is gone. We are bone and gristle and anger at this point. And frankly, I don't know

what it and we don't, we also, we don't know if the taps have been turned off for these refugee claimants. There's still a backlog of God knows how many. We do know that the numbers are going down in terms of the ones that are are getting into the system, but there's still, it's just still way too much. And we have nowhere to put them.

There's nowhere to put them. And when the city makes it their responsibility to figure it out, the costs are exorbitant. So it depends on where you want this. We have to pay for it because they, we brought them in. Yeah. So it's what level do you want to do it? Is it your federal taxes or are you going to put this all on the homeowners in Toronto? Because that, there's a difference.

there, right? Yeah. So where are we going to find the savings? Where are we going to do? There's no savings in Toronto. They're just going to put it on us. Well, my question is, like, how many, Canada's a big country with lots of cities. What is the percentage of these refugee claimants and asylum seekers that are coming specifically to Toronto? Why are so many of them coming to Toronto? How many, I'd love to know, how many are going to Edmonton and to Calgary and to Winnipeg and all points in between because if I had to guess I would say the lion's share of them are coming here and why is that why is that because we don't have the infrastructure for it we don't have the money for it and this feels to me like a burden and it is a burden I'm sorry

the people themselves are not the burden the the the the the financial burden is the burden that should be shared it is a Canadian issue it is a Canadian responsibility I do not know why it falls on us. Coming up, let's make sense of all this. What does it mean for you? Anthony Fury joins us next. Let's face it, finding your next favorite podcast can be tough. But that's about to change.

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And the captain of the ship is saying that in order to avoid it, in order to avoid it, in order to avoid this budget shortfall of over $150 million that will see our, essentially our homeless number explode because the refugees and the asylum claimants that we have in the city will not have the space unless we do something about it and that something is raising property tax by 2%. Here to talk about this, maybe some solutions, is Anthony Fury, National columnist and broadcaster. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. great to be here ben okay so yeah looks at i i said earlier that my i are is divided in a 2080 split 20% for olivia chow but 80% for the people who opened the doors and did not

have a plan or the money to to to deal with this problem adequately and that's that's uh that's the feds uh how do you see it uh i'd adjust the ratio a little bit but but i appreciate your point and i'm and i'm with you on that guiding philosophy that olivia chow is ultimately right now responding problem that was caused by the federal government, really by Justin Trudeau, back when he sent the signal that we would pretty much welcome any and all forms of asylum seekers at the number of their choosing and the time and border crossing of their choosing. If you go back and look at that famous hashtag, welcome to Canada tweet, there's been a lot of actual long form reportage that that finds that that tweet was mistaken for policy.

Human traffickers in the northeastern seaboard of the United States would use it on their literature to tell people, oh, no, it's okay, you can cross it, Roxham Road, they'll give you free stuff everywhere, which that part is true. A lot of these federal policies led to the crisis that we're seeing unfold in Toronto, in Niagara Falls, they had major issues there, in cities all across Canada, Montreal, had major concerns as well. And the federal government has failed to adequately manage the immigration. intake on many categories, obviously.

We're talking about international student fallouts now, but an asylum seeker is definitely a major problem. So Olivia Chow was right the other year when she asked Justin Schoe for about $100 million to cover the shortfall because we have 40% of our shelter occupants were asylum seekers, which is not the point of our shelter system. So she was right to make that request, and she's right to request funds again now,

but she's wrong to say that she's going to punish Toronto taxpayers by taking more money from them at a time when we know there's so much waste in the municipal budget and there are many other opportunities to pursue. And not only that, you know, we just sort of did a little bit of a dive into how inefficient we as a city are at managing the homelessness issue in our shelter system. I mean, listen, if we are, if each two-bed sell, as we're calling it, cost the city $1.36 million and a condo in one of the most expensive parts of Toronto in Yorkville costs only $620,000. I mean, make that make sense to me.

No, absolutely. There's an efficiency issue. And the housing department, they do a whole array of options. As you know, there are motels on Kingston Road that are almost entirely seconded for this. So they look at a variety of things to manage there. So there's a lot of management issues that can be done better. There are basic policies that are kind of related to the shelter service that are wasting a lot of money I have in front of me right now at an FOI document that explains that we spend $5 million per year on crack pipe kits and other drug injection kits. Oh, wait, so you got that information?

We have been looking for that information on this show for a very long time, trying to figure out how much the city has been spending on that sort of paraphernalia. We haven't able to find it. So you found it. Yeah, I have the document. I can't believe I scoot myself because I do want to put it out there through other avenues, but yes, we do provide that. And that's actually to the works program. So there are other pockets of funding that probably go to other channels as well, although the group called the works is sort of the main distributor of this. This is just one example of the millions of dollars of waste. So I mean, how dare they turn around and say we're going to punish the taxpayers when there's so much smarter decision-making that they can do? Maybe the, maybe the political thing is say, oh, well, let's push this on Mark Carney. But I don't think it's politically savvy of the Libby Child to do that. So realistically, as somebody who has done a far deeper dive into the inefficiencies, let's

call it, I think that's a generous way of saying, the inefficiencies of funding at the municipal level, do you think that there is $150 million of wasted taxpayer funds that if cordoned off and repurposed, could deal with this issue? Yeah, I know your show ends at noon. We'll have to stay with Alex and cover the other three hours with her on it. I'll give just one example. So the city of Toronto acknowledges it has a higher attrition rate than other cities and some of their departments have a much higher one,

attrition being when people just walk away from their job for a variety of reasons. They don't acknowledge this is an opportunity, though, to get tens of millions of dollars off the books every year in terms of allocating, we need to replace many of those people because they're doing important functions, but we don't need to replace all of them. So there's always even staffing reallocations that we can do without actually letting anyone go. Many sort of procedural things.

The drug, spending $5 million on drugs or spending millions on the renamings of the Young Intundas Square, that's kind of the low-hanging fruit. Even though they don't take it, you'd think they take the low-hanging fruit, but they don't. There's that. And then there's the bigger structural. one. So there's absolutely issues. And Ben, one other thing I do want to say, while we are kind of giving a city a bit of a pass and saying, okay, it's Trudeau's fault that we have these asylum problems, one thing Toronto needs to do very much so right now is repeal the sanctuary

city designation that they put in place in 2013. Okay. And for those who don't know what that is, I mean, a lot of people hear that as it relates to sort of the American experience. Talk to me about what it means in Toronto. It's fairly similar to the American experience. What it means in the letter of the law is that to access city services, you do not need to prove citizenship and you won't be asked for it. So if there is somebody who is here illegally undocumented, whatever term you want to use, someone who has had their asylum claim rejected but hasn't left yet, and we know there are many thousands of people in that category, you can still go to the Toronto Public Library and

check out a book. You can still enroll your child in a swimming program. You can still get help from Toronto public health. And we appreciate that there's a sort of humanness to all of that, and we can bicker about the details, but fine. But what that also does is it invites and encourages the sense that Toronto is a city that just wants people to be coming, who are not following the rules, who are, it encourages people to cross the border illegally and come to Toronto. Yeah, sorry, Anthony, is that why?

Toronto seems to over index in terms of how many refugee claimants and asylum seekers we have here. It seems like if you take the raw number of them that have come in over the past few years, Toronto seems to be a place where they gravitate two. We were struggling with it during the break. Why is this Toronto's responsibility when we have a lot of cities around the country? This should be a Canadian issue, a Canadian responsibility. and we should share the load, and yet it feels like the majority of the load is here. Yeah, I think if you offer people kind of gold-plated social services,

so not just food when they're hungry and a bed to sleep to, you know, escape from the elements, but if you offer them not just the drug kits, but the drugs themselves now increasingly, obviously if you give away the free stuff, they're going to come. And then if you pass other measures that say, and if you're in other categories of criminality and the legality. We're not going to ask you any questions. We're not going to bug you. Yes, you're a magnet for it. The one thing our sanctuary city designation also does then, that's similar to the U.S., is Toronto police are very much discouraged from cooperating with the federal government and federal immigration authorities.

It's funny. While Toronto police is expected to bring in this gun buy or cooperate with the gun buyback program that's acknowledged as a failure, they're also expected to not cooperate if the RCMP or immigration says, hey, guys, can you help us out? We're needing to check the status of, you know, these people who we believe are dangerous, illegal immigrants. All right.

Anthony Fury, I want to thank you so much. You've given us a lot more food for thought. And I wish we had much more time to talk to you. And we will be reading whatever you're right about this. So we do appreciate your time. And we appreciate your insights. Thanks, Ben. All the best.

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