Imagine a city with minimal construction delays, with fast and robust transportation options. One that considers high-speed internet to be an essential, just like water or electricity. A place where it’s all delivered equitably and cost effectively. We’re going to deliver it.

Our plan involves building a best-in-class infrastructure program that’s cost effective. We can use it to reduce your cost of living, reduce your frustration, and give you back your time.

Plan Highlights

  • Municipally-owned internet. We’re going there. Toronto can’t afford to lose hundreds of millions in GDP because of an outage.
  • Collaborative infrastructure. Meet Toronto Infrastructure, our plan to build a more collaborative effort between departments.
  • Saving you money and improving your quality of life. Our plan will reduce your cost of living and give you back more of your time.
  • Synchronized transportation. Planning transportation as one comprehensive system to get you where you need to be fast, safely, and with the lowest cost.
  • Housing is infrastructure. We can’t build a city without thinking of housing as essential infrastructure.

The Problem

Toronto’s infrastructure isn’t great. Municipal departments make due with what they have, but they don’t have much. It lacks investment and leadership to get where it needs to be. The lack of investment is building up like a ticking debt bomb, waiting to go off at any minute.

If you’ve recently moved to the City, you might notice something peculiar. The same streets are ripped up multiple times, resulting in frequent closures. Once for streetcars, once for hydro, once for… you get the picture. Frustrating, right? After awhile, it’ll just be the way it is. That’s when you officially become a Torontonian.

You see, you merely adopted frustrating delays. Torontonians were born in it, moulded by it. We didn’t see a construction free road until we grew up and visited another country. By then, it was blinding and we didn’t understand what we were looking at.

Okay, the Bane joke was just to lighten a very frustrating experience that shouldn’t exist. It’s expensive, causes delays, and generally erodes your quality of life. 

Consulting with planners and project managers over the years, we learned this is a collaboration issue. Different departments fight for their interests, sometimes at the expense of others. It results in delays that aren’t just frustrating, they drive up the cost of things like housing.

The Solution

Our solution is to streamline Toronto’s system and facilitate more collaboration. We would like to create a single organization where the heads of these groups work together. Turn planning conflicts into frictionless problem solving. Team work makes the dream work.

Our plan marries intelligent service delivery with diversified revenues to fund it. We don’t think it’s fair to beg for a bigger share of your paycheque every time there’s a shortfall. At the same time, we can’t just keep pushing investment in infrastructure back.

We also have a different view of what infrastructure is. Housing is infrastructure. It’s an essential required by everyone and we need to treat it that way. So is high speed internet.

The current system is broken. Let’s fix it. 

Here’s how we’re going to do it. 

Municipal High-Speed Internet

High-speed internet is essential for life in Canada, and it’s required for business. It’s how we communicate with our friends and family, and it’s where we watch cat videos. That’s why we have a revenue neutral plan that’s going to drive down the cost, and make it more accessible for all. There’s also no reason it can’t be the best internet service you’ve ever had.

Our plan is to establish a municipal high-speed internet company in charge of the pipes. We’ll leverage our existing fiber optic network powering City services. It will also benefit from our unified infrastructure plan. No, this isn’t to stick it to the Big Three, but to facilitate more competition.

The strategy involves forming a dual-class company where the City will have control. Larger companies will require a larger buy-in, and we’ll consolidate costs. Speaking to service providers, we found the largest cost is running cable. Not for the City though, if we do it during routine maintenance to expand our network.

By lowering non-productive costs, this will improve margins for telecom providers. Instead of two competing side-by-side systems installed separately, one team installs everything. The same team conducting synchronized maintenance with the rest of the infrastructure.

It will be radically transparent, showing the public exactly how much it costs to operate. If our streamlined delivery doesn’t turn into savings for you, then we’ll roll out our own service. We’d prefer if facilitating competition drove your internet costs down, but if it doesn’t, we aren’t going to back down from competing if need be.

Toronto Infrastructure: A Unified Plan For Delivering Services

Our game-changing idea is establishing Toronto Infrastructure, a collaborative service delivery. It’s our proposed plan to get the heads of infrastructure services under one roof. By doing this, we’re hoping to design a collaborative system with less friction. This will save you money and reduce the frequency of delays in your life.

We didn’t just come up with this plan. Over the past few years, we took a deep dive into housing costs. Various departments all said the same thing — they spend way too much time arguing. Each department has to watch out for their own interests, resulting in costly delays. It also means duplicate tasks are conducted. This ultimately costs you more money.

Our plan will reduce traffic, lower the cost of housing, and allow the City to invest in growth.

Collaborative Transportation

Our city needs universal transportation. Everyone has the right to get where they need to be, and it should be pain-free. It doesn’t matter if you’re traveling by subway, walking, driving, or cycling. Until we think of transportation as a universal issue, we won’t be able to look at the problem equitably. That’s why we’re going to put the various departments under one roof. 

It’s not a risky plan, it’s a time-tested strategy used across Europe and Asia. One example is Transport For London, which oversees all transportation in London, England. Sidewalks, trolleys, the Underground, etc. all planned by one system. It results in a robust system with fewer delays and better services. We’re going to help you get where you need to be fast, affordably, and with the fewest delays possible.

We dive into this in more detail in our transportation plan. 

Housing Is Infrastructure

Toronto is suffocating as it fails to deliver housing sufficient for its growth. It’s quickly becoming the Hunger Games, and a non-productive drain on the economy. Let’s fix it.

Our plan involves changing the way we think about housing. It’s not a luxury service, it’s an essential required for life. If people aren’t securely housed, it threatens the long-term viability of the City you worked so hard to build.

That’s why we have the most ambitious housing plan the City has ever seen. We’re not just making it easier to build, our City-owned real estate company will leverage existing City lands to deliver more housing. Our plan will deliver places to work, shop, and live. It will also deliver sustainable revenues to help fund infrastructure without more taxes.

More details are in our housing and transportation plans.