Winter is never kind to Toronto — a city that lives in constant denial about the facts of its climate and latitude — but winter 2023 already feels like one of the harder ones in recent memory. Granted, it hasn’t been “COVID-19 filling the hospitals, and lockdowns are closing the schools” bad. But, whatever one thinks of where we stand in the pandemic right now, there’s a sense we’re still grinding through a social form of long COVID. The public-transit system that makes the city function — to the extent that it does — feels profoundly unsafe, and the lack of security poses a very real risk of prolonging, or making permanent, the current slump in transit ridership. And the city’s finances will be imperilled so long as passengers (and their farebox revenue) stay away.
In the context of the city’s yawning budget hole and real anxieties about public safety, the fate of the CaféTO program might seem like small potatoes. Proposals to repurpose curbside parking spaces on Toronto’s streets for less antisocial purposes, like restaurant seating, predate COVID-19 but were stymied by the city’s insistence that it recoup the revenue from any lost parking space. The pandemic changed that, and Mayor John Tory led the push by city council to allow curbside café spaces without any fees.
The changes to main streets have been as welcome as they’ve been dramatic. Once-sterile queues of parked cars have been transformed, at least in the warmer months, into dynamic spaces that range from the merely useful to the often quite lovely. But the CaféTO program always faced resistance from a range of sources, including the Toronto Parking Authority (an agency that exists solely to subsidize motor-vehicle use and still exists in 2023 somehow) and reactionary elements in the city’s business community who are nominally concerned about access but consistently, wildly overestimate how many of their own customers come from vehicle traffic.
So it’s disappointing that the reactionaries seem likely to win at Toronto city council, at least based on the changes city staff will be presenting to Tory’s executive committee next week. The Wild West years of CaféTO were never going to last, and, sure enough, the city is proposing to introduce a number of standards regarding accessibility and “aesthetic requirements” and to impose fees nominally intended to recover the city’s costs — both the lost revenue from on-street parking and the cost of administering the CaféTO program itself. Pro-CaféTO voices in the business sector are already warning that this will dramatically curtail the use of curbside cafés. And, indeed, that seems to be the point: staff project the number of cafés will fall from about 800 last year to about 400 this year.
One doesn’t need to weep for the city’s restaurant owners here. They were given a pretty sweet deal — free use of public property — and that was unlikely to last forever. And, some changes, like insisting on accessibility standards, are both good in their own right and part of the city’s obligations under the Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act. But there are more than a few reasons to be skeptical of the city’s stated aims here.
For starters, the level of the fees being charged is certainly up for debate. The Toronto Parking Authority says it lost $2.3 million in 2022 thanks to the temporary loss of 1,897 parking spaces (about $1,247 a space). The city spent a further $5.6 million on administration, bringing the per-space “cost” of CaféTO to something more like $5,000. City staff are proposing this year to charge $3,000 for an annual permit, with the missing increment being borne by taxpayers. But the costs don’t end there: the city anticipates more than $14,000 or so in upfront costs to businesses for structural upgrades. The result of all these new or increased costs is that dramatic decrease in participation that’s being openly anticipated.
(On the “aesthetic requirements” item, I will simply say that, more than a decade later, city-hall observers can be forgiven for worrying that this will metastasize into another Toronto A La Cart fiasco. Prove us wrong! Please!)
I don’t know what the optimal cost would be for a curbside-café permit. I do know that both city staff and the city’s restaurant owners agree that the charges included in this report will do serious harm to one of the few beneficial, pleasant things that came out of the pandemic. What’s particularly galling is that these sums are, frankly, not very large by the standard of the city’s overall budget — insignificant compared to the salutary effects that CaféTO had on our major streets.
In a normal world, we could have a reasonable debate about what kind of costs taxpayers would be willing to bear in order to continue enjoying more pleasant public spaces. Instead, Tory’s instincts to keep property taxes as low as humanly possible have boxed him in. To keep this off the costs of the property-tax base, the program has to be mostly paid for by user fees. To do that, it has to be vastly less useful and effective.
It's a story we’ve seen play out elsewhere in the province’s capital over more than a decade of austerity. But, given everything else going on in this city, it feels like it carries a new risk. Is now, of all times, the right time for council to make the city even worse than it already is?
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