With less than a week left before election night, Toronto’s mayoral candidates faced off in another debate on Monday evening.
The debate was hosted by Now Toronto and The Brandon Gonez Show, and five top-polling candidates attended, including Brad Bradford, Josh Matlow, Mitzie Hunter, Anthony Furey and Chloe Brown.
Mayoral candidate Olivia Chow, who is currently leading the race in the polls, declined her invite to Monday’s debate. Candidates Ana Bailão and Mark Saunders also didn’t attend.
Host Brandon Gonez dove right into the questions starting with how the potential mayors could tackle the city’s housing crisis and affordability.
All candidates agreed that the previous government’s system wasn’t enough to provide sufficient housing for Torontonians and that changes are essential.
As a follow-up, Gonez posed the question, “If you plan on making housing more affordable, how will you make up for the loss in revenue?” he said regarding the city’s $1.5 billion budget shortfall.
Gonez mentioned that Toronto is the only city in the province that makes home buyers pay the land transfer tax to the federal government and to the Ontario government. The city makes revenue from this tax, especially with the rising costs of homes.
Matlow said that revenue needs to be raised above the rate of inflation to get the budget in order to then be able to provide affordable housing and safety, another issue the city faces.
Furey said he will eliminate the municipal land transfer tax for first-time home buyers and make housing affordability a priority in the budget. He said he doesn’t want to “raise people’s bills.”
Bradford disagreed with Matlow and said property tax should be at or below the rate of inflation because the city is already facing affordability issues, whether it’s homes or at the grocery store.
Brown plans to offer commercial tenants discounts on rental costs so more people have the opportunity to bring their businesses to the city and earn more profit with higher-paying jobs.
Hunter said that she will implement a six per cent tax increase to make up for the lost revenue but will halve the cost for Torontonians making less than $80,000 a year, including not changing rates for seniors with this income.
On the topic of safety, candidates focused on the rise of the city’s random violence and how to tackle this.
Brown and Matlow agreed that there doesn’t need to be more police officers on the street to combat the safety issue, but instead, funds need to be allocated to implement more neighbourhood programs that youth and vulnerable communities could access.
“There is no causal relationship between how many officers you have and the crime rate,” Matlow said. “Between 2001 and 2012, we had more cops and more crime.”
Hunter will keep the police budget as it is, which calls for 200 more officers, and she said the growth in Toronto’s population requires additional cops.
While Bradford claims Toronto needs more frontline officers, he said the city needs mobile crisis response teams for emergencies that police officers aren’t trained for.
Furey, contrary to his opponents, plans to hire 500 additional police officers to tackle the drug crisis, which is what he considers to be the main concern for safety in the city and what he says is attributed to the random violence.
He said he will replace “drug injection sites” with treatment centres.
“By helping those people reclaim their lives, we will help make our families safer,” Furey said.
Furey was then criticized by the rest of the candidates for not considering that people with drug addiction issues are also a part of families.
Matlow said Furey’s plan is “shallow.” Hunter said it’s “simplistic.”
The topic of drugs got Matlow and Furey in an intense debate, and they, along with Hunter, talked over each other.
The interaction led Furey to claim that the other candidates were attacking him.
Matlow, Bradford, Hunter and Brown agreed that people at each end of the city, not situated near the downtown core, such as Rexdale and Scarborough, want accountability from the city council.
“Government never makes its way above Bloor,” Brown said. “ Communities are ready for power, but they lack the money. They lack the infrastructure.”
Toronto’s mayoral election will occur on Monday, June 26.