It made for one hell of a contrast. Inside city hall this past Thursday, Mayor John Tory and the councillors on his executive committee were praising the city’s 2020 budget. Outside city hall, chaos reigned.

While Tory listed off investments in the budget – which will be debated by Toronto council on Wednesday – and declared the financial plan “will make the city stronger and make the people stronger,” the people outside were dealing with the aftermath of a morning subway derailment. Shuttle buses couldn’t handle the crowds. Frustrations boiled over. Thousands were late for work. It was the second such derailment in less than a month.

Whatever the technical cause of these TTC snafus, they do help make the case for the fiscal strategy Tory has embraced this year. The city’s infrastructure is in rough shape. The status quo is untenable. New investments are needed.

So there’s good news for people who spent some time last week cursing the sorry state of the city. By moving to raise residential property taxes by an additional eight per cent through 2025 with an expansion of his city building fund, Tory has created room for the spending Toronto’s infrastructure requires.

But it’s also become clear Tory’s city building fund won’t be enough to fully build out of the hole the city is in.

Instead, the increased tax is just the first part of a two-step strategy. The second step is a big bet on enhanced cooperation between Tory and his counterparts at the provincial and federal government.

Toronto is looking for a lot more out of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford.

Intergovernmental friendliness is assumed all over the budget. The most pressing need is a $77 million transfer from the federal government to pay for the cost of accommodating refugees and asylum claimants in the shelter system. But beyond that, many major long-term plans in the budget also call for the funding pie to be split three ways.

The city has assumed a three-way split for the cash needed to buy enough TTC buses, subway trains and streetcars to meet growing demand, for example. The same goes for the city’s new supportive housing plan to get people out of shelters – Toronto has found enough cash to build just 600 of the 1800 new housing units the plan calls for each year. It’s a similar story with Toronto’s aggressive $23.4 billion long-term affordable housing strategy, which looks to the other governments for $14.9 billion. Another pie cut in thirds.

Tory has a good case to make for more equitable slices. The Toronto region, with the city as its centre, contributes 18.5 per cent of Canada’s GDP and about half of Ontario’s. That contribution relies on infrastructure like the TTC actually being functional.

Toronto’s place as the centre of a growing GTA has also meant the city shoulders a disproportionate amount of social service costs. Toronto offered 6,687 shelter beds on average in 2018, ten times as many as offered by Durham Region, Halton Region, York Region and the City of Hamilton combined, according to a recent budget report.

But direct federal and provincial cash makes up just 21.3 per cent of this year’s operating budget, and 17 per cent of the capital plan. Not a well-sliced pie.

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For Tory, the trouble going forward will be that well-reasoned arguments often don’t matter much in the face of political expediency. Municipal politicians have been pushing for a fairer funding arrangements from Queen’s Park and Ottawa for decades, with some limited progress, but mostly in the form of ad-hoc announcements timed for maximum electoral benefit.

If things aren’t different this time, the mayor may find himself wishing he had pushed for a more significant property tax increase or powers to enact other locally-controlled taxes and fees. But for now, Tory’s city hall is pinning their big plans on an old standby — getting by with a little help from their friends.

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