Last week Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow introduced a surprise motion at Toronto City Council seizing control of the Toronto Parking Authority, the agency that manages scores of publicly-provided parking lots all over the city. The arms-length board that was tasked with overseeing the TPA has been dismissed and high-ranking city officials have taken their place. The city’s top civil servant has been directed to determine what the financial implications are for taking the management of Green P lots internal to the city’s bureaucracy, potentially reducing overhead and allowing more of the Authority’s revenues to flow to the city budget, reducing pressure on property taxes.
Chow’s motion explicitly places this move in the context of the 2026 budget, as the city scrambles to fill yawning fiscal holes from reduced transfers from other levels of government as well as the impacts of the deteriorating housing market. (Many observers warned for more than a decade that the city was dangerously over reliant on development charges and land transfer taxes as a revenue source, exposing itself to profoundly unpleasant consequences when the market turns. They were largely ignored.) It also comes as the city was already reconsidering the use of city-owned lots, particularly in areas of the city where planning policies have been liberalized to allow more and different kinds of housing.
If she wants it, Chow has an avenue before her that could solve a large measure of her immediate fiscal problems, serve the city’s larger environmental goals, and improve its fiscal position over the long term.
She just needs to destroy the Toronto Parking Authority.
The TPA’s forebear was created in 1952 to answer the wailing of downtown Toronto merchants, who asserted that they were losing customers to suburban malls and that only affordable, abundant parking would save their businesses. (An entire human lifespan has passed and very little has changed.) The business model of the Authority is pretty straightforward: on-street parking spaces are extremely cheap to build and maintain (at most just paint on asphalt) and also command higher rates, so the TPA uses on-street parking to subsidize more expensive off-street lots, and a share of its profits are paid to its sole shareholder (the city) in the form of a dividend. While the TPA has expanded over the decades, most of its lots are still in the pre-amalgamation core of the city.
Whatever the wisdom of creating the TPA in 1952, in 2025 its existence is working at cross purposes to numerous other city priorities. It’s an explicit subsidy for car users in a city that’s already choked by traffic congestion. The TPA occupies a massive amount of land in a city that’s being crippled by a housing shortage. And at a time when citizens are losing what meagre trust in government they have been clinging to, the TPA keeps findingitself in scandals regarding its own spending and governance.
Perhaps most acutely for Chow’s immediate problem, the Authority doesn’t even improve the city’s own financial standing. The vast majority of off-street lots are lightly used, and the ones that have the highest use are also, perversely, often closest to subway stations — precisely the places where we least need to be encouraging car use.
Remember: the whole business model is for off-street lots to be subsidized by on-street parking rates. That means that the city could sell the Authority’s off-street lots, continue to charge its current rates for on-street parking, and it would actually be saving money. Better still, an analysis conducted for the Toronto Board of Trade in 2016 showed that even modest mixed-use redevelopments could actually bring more revenue in the form of property taxes than the TPA currently provides in parking revenue. A decade of land inflation in the city has almost certainly bolstered that case.
To put it another way: progressives and even some conservatives are skeptical of selling public assets because they’re (correctly) wary of trading immediate, one-time revenue for longer-term sustainable income. But this is the rare case where this simply isn’t the problem: selling the Authority’s off-street lots would both provide immediate revenue to solve the city’s budget problem and would improve its longer-term fiscal picture if those lots were redeveloped in the way that the city’s own planning policies would allow.
The TPA’s persistence into the 21st century has more to do with status quo bias and the allure of a big, off-budget pot of money that councillors can raise without the political pain of voting for tax increases — it has little to do with the actual financial, environmental, traffic or planning benefits it provides to the city. It’s unlikely that Chow has the votes on council for a truly radical dismantling of the Authority, and less likely still that council will want to undertake something like this in an election year. But Toronto’s budget in 2027 is unlikely to be much rosier than in 2026, and whoever is mayor will face the same problem — with the same answer staring them in the face.
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