Mayor Olivia Chow has pledged to hold property tax increases at or around the rate of inflation if she is re-elected on October 26, her campaign confirmed on Friday.
It is a commitment that will be measured against her own record, because the three budgets she has delivered so far have varied widely.
The numbers behind the pledge
- 2024: a 9.5 per cent increase, the largest since amalgamation
- 2025: 6.9 per cent
- 2026: 2.2 per cent, slightly below inflation
The trajectory is the campaign’s argument. Chow’s spokesperson Shirven Rezvany said the mayor “didn’t create Toronto’s financial crisis but took responsibility to fix it,” pointing to the roughly $2 billion budget gap the city faced when she took office in 2023.
Read one way, the numbers show a city that front-loaded painful increases to close a structural hole and has now returned to something sustainable. Read another way, they show a mayor who has already asked homeowners for far more than inflation twice.
What her rivals say
Brad Bradford’s campaign said Chow did not keep an earlier promise of modest increases, and that voters have every reason not to take her word this time.
Chris Alexander called the pledge a flimsy campaign promise and countered with his own: no tax increase at all in his first year, and increases below inflation in his second.
Why property tax is the ballot question
Toronto funds a large share of city services from property tax, and unlike the federal and provincial governments it cannot run an operating deficit. Every dollar not raised has to be found in service cuts, reserves, user fees, or transfers from other governments.
That is what makes any tax pledge worth reading closely. A promise to hold increases near inflation is only half a plan; the other half is what gets funded, and what does not, when the bill comes due. Voters will get the specifics in the campaign’s costed platforms.
Toronto’s municipal election is on Monday, October 26. Advance voting runs October 6 to 11, and the deadline to request a mail-in ballot is September 24.
Sources: CP24, CBC News, City of Toronto, September 4, 2026.
