There’s an elephant in the room in this Toronto mayoral election that few people are talking about: the city faces a $1-billion budget shortfall and it can’t run a deficit.

If Toronto doesn’t get serious about controlling its spending problem, Toronto households could be looking at a 30 per cent property tax hike to fill that hole.

Yet there’s a simple solution Toronto’s politicians could turn to. By returning city hall’s spending levels to those in place just six months ago, Toronto’s entire budget gap would disappear.

On his way out the door, former mayor John Tory pushed a budget through council that increased spending by over $1 billion this year alone. By returning to Tory’s 2022 budget, the city could save $1 billion and the spectre of a massive property tax hike could be taken off the table.

Unfortunately, that’s not a solution any of Toronto’s mayoral candidates seem to be ready to turn to. Virtually all of them are crisscrossing the city promising to spend hundreds of millions of additional dollars and acting as if the city can afford yet another spending spree.

Frontrunner Olivia Chow has laid out hundreds of millions of dollars of new spending plans but hasn’t presented any serious plan to balance the books or find savings.

To their credit, other candidates, like Brad Bradford, Anthony Furey and Mark Saunders, have presented some savings solutions.

Bradford has promised to increase competition in bidding for municipal construction contracts, which he says will save the city $200 million.

Furey has made a similar promise to open up contracts while also pledging to do a top-to-bottom spending review and implement a hiring freeze at city hall. 

Saunders says he’ll end pet projects and work with the auditor general to get the city’s finances back on track.

Promises like opening up construction contract bidding are no brainers that all candidates should get behind. But to date, no candidate has promised to find savings at the scale the city needs to fix its budget woes and avoid a massive property tax hike.

To meet the moment, Toronto needs to immediately return city spending to 2022 levels.

Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Over the past five years, Toronto increased spending at an average annual rate of 11 per cent. During the same period, inflation and population growth only grew at an average annual rate of  4.5 per cent.

Listening to mayoral candidates pitch their platforms, you’d never know that spending has gotten so out of control at city hall. In 2018, the city budget was $11.1 billion. This year, it’s projected to be $16.2 billion. If that’s not an out-of-control municipal budget, then Canada doesn’t have cold winters.

If Toronto had kept spending hikes at the level of inflation plus population growth since 2018, the city would be spending $13.6 billion this year, not $16.2 billion.

The city budget last year was $15 billion. Going back to last year’s spending levels would still mean spending $1.4 billion more than the city would be spending had the budget been kept in check over the past half decade.

Toronto taxpayers can’t afford a 30 per cent property tax hike. But that’s what will be in store for taxpayers if the city chooses not to cut spending and doesn’t receive a bailout from Queen’s Park or Parliament Hill. News flash: none appears to be forthcoming.

It’s time for Toronto’s mayoral candidates to get serious. The city needs to bridge it’s $1-billion budget gap and returning sanity to city spending is the way to get there.

Any candidate that doesn’t present a plan to get spending under control should be kept miles away from the mayor’s office.