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Guide

Open for Business, Closed for Delivery

Toronto City Hall towers and council chamber at Nathan Phillips Square under a cloudy sky

Toronto is leaving billions on the table, and the reason is not a lack of interest

Interest is not the problem. Delivery is.

Toronto should be attracting billions more in investment every year, and it is not. The world already wants to be here: our talent, our universities, our stability and our diversity are assets most cities would envy.

The failure is at City Hall. Toronto treats investment attraction as a line item, not a strategy. It funds a small agency, counts announcements, and then lets investors run into the same walls residents hit every day: slow approvals, crumbling infrastructure, gridlock and housing nobody can afford.

I am an engineer. When a structure fails, you do not blame the load. You find the weak points. Here they are.

A world city with a small-town budget

Toronto’s investment attraction runs through Toronto Global, a regional not-for-profit created in 2017. By the City’s own count, it has helped land about 280 investment projects, roughly 33,000 jobs and $3.8 billion in capital across the GTA since then.

That sounds large until you put it on a calendar. Spread over eight years, $3.8 billion is under half a billion dollars a year, for a region of more than seven million people and the financial capital of Canada.

The City’s own contribution tells you how seriously it takes the job:

YearCity of Toronto funding
2025$2.3 million
2026$2.4 million
2027$2.5 million

Toronto’s 2026 operating budget is about $18.9 billion. The City spends roughly one-hundredth of one percent of it on telling the world why it should invest here. Staff covered the first year’s increase from existing economic development budgets, and said future increases would be cut from that same budget if the City could not afford them, rather than treating this as a priority in its own right.

Thousands look. Few land.

As of September 2024, Toronto Global was working 5,717 prospects at the first stage of its pipeline. Just 218 were weighing a location decision, and only 87 were establishing operations. It is a snapshot, not one group of firms followed over time, but the shape is clear: Toronto reaches thousands of companies, and most never arrive.

The gap between interest and arrival is where the City should be working hardest. It is also where investors meet everything described below.

One region, pitching alone

Toronto Global was built on a sound idea: investors choose regions, not ward boundaries, so the GTA should sell itself as one. Six municipalities signed on at launch.

That partnership has come apart. Mississauga, Brampton and Durham declined to sign the 2022 agreement, leaving only Toronto, York and Halton as municipal funders. Under that agreement, Toronto paid about 95% of the municipal share.

A divided region competing against Chicago, Boston and Austin is a region that loses. Rebuilding that coalition is a mayor’s job, and nobody at City Hall has made it one.

What investors find when they look closely

No marketing budget can sell a city that does not deliver. Investors do their homework, and what they find is the same city residents live in every day.

  • Approvals that take years. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association’s 2024 Municipal Benchmarking Study, as reported by the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), found the six GTA municipalities it studied averaged 19.4 months to approve housing applications, against a national average of 11.6 months. Calgary managed 4.2.
  • Infrastructure that is falling behind. The City’s own capital plan puts more than half of its spending into repairing what already exists. A company choosing a site asks whether the water, roads and power will hold. Toronto cannot yet give a confident answer.
  • Workers who cannot get to work. Congestion is a cost every employer pays in lost hours. A city that cannot move its people cannot promise a company its talent.
  • Workers who cannot afford to live here. The talent pool is Toronto’s biggest selling point. It shrinks every time a young engineer, nurse or programmer moves to Hamilton or Calgary because rent ate their salary.

These are not separate problems from investment. They are the investment problem.

Counting ribbons, not results

The City reports investment in projects and dollars announced. Residents need to know something else: did it create good jobs, for whom, and where?

The record shows how narrow the wins have been. The largest projects the City highlighted between 2022 and 2024 were mostly technology and finance firms, each adding between 100 and 600 jobs. That is welcome. It is not a strategy for Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York or Thorncliffe Park, where newcomers with engineering degrees drive taxis because no one connected them to the companies that need them.

The City’s 2025 report to Council counts jobs and dollars. It does not tell residents what those jobs pay, who filled them, or whether local firms won the supply contracts. If we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it, and we cannot hold anyone accountable for it.

What an engineer would do

Fixing this does not require a new bureaucracy. It requires treating investment as a delivery problem, with clear standards and public results.

  1. Fix the foundations first. Repair-first infrastructure, transit that runs and congestion relief are the strongest investment pitch Toronto can make.
  2. One investor desk, with a clock on it. One City contact from first inquiry to opening day, with published service deadlines for permits and connections, and public reporting when the City misses them.
  3. Rebuild the regional team. Bring Mississauga, Brampton and Durham back to one table, with one pitch for one region.
  4. Partner capital without selling the city. Pension funds, the Canada Infrastructure Bank and long-term international investors can help build. Public assets stay public, contract terms are published, and independent reviews come before money moves.
  5. Turn diversity into trade routes. Toronto’s communities are direct bridges to the Gulf, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. Trade missions should bring community business leaders, not just officials.
  6. Make investment pay off in every neighbourhood. Hiring and apprenticeships for residents facing barriers, diverse and local suppliers on City-assisted projects, and neighbourhood incubators beyond the downtown core.
  7. Measure what matters. A public dashboard of jobs, wages and local spending per public dollar, not ribbon-cuttings.
  8. Screen for ethics and international law. Publish human-rights screening criteria for City contracts and City-assisted investment, require companies to disclose any involvement in activities listed by the UN Human Rights Office or linked to forced labour, and apply UN Guiding Principles due diligence before money moves.
  9. Put community benefits in writing. Every City-assisted project carries a community benefits agreement with hiring, training, wage and supplier targets, and the results are published.

One guardrail matters as much as any of these: no handouts. Ontario law bars Toronto from giving individual companies grants or tax breaks outside Community Improvement Plans or specific provincial approval. Toronto should compete on speed, certainty and quality of life, never on giveaways.

Judge investment by what it does for people

An investment is not a success because a ribbon was cut. It is a success when the people of this city are better off.

Every City-assisted project should be judged on its social outcomes: good jobs at fair wages; hiring of newcomers and underemployed residents from Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York and Thorncliffe Park; contracts for diverse and local suppliers; affordable homes within reach of the jobs; and a smaller environmental footprint, not a bigger one.

We know this works, because it has been done here. The Eglinton Crosstown was Ontario’s first large infrastructure project with formal community benefits commitments, and Metrolinx reports more than 2,400 jobs created and 572 local hires on it. Toronto has used its purchasing to set fair wages and ethical standards since 1893. In 2016 it adopted a Social Procurement Program that puts workforce development requirements on contracts over $5 million, and in 2019 it adopted a Community Benefits Framework.

The tools exist. They need to become the rule, not the exception, with the results published for every project.

Investment with a conscience

When I design a structure, I check every load it carries. A city should check every dollar it takes in and pays out the same way.

Toronto should not court, assist or contract with companies that profit from serious violations of international law and human rights. That is not a fringe position. It follows from international law and from Canada’s own stated policy.

Global Affairs Canada states that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose Article 49 forbids an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into territory it occupies. On 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice advised that states must abstain from economic or trade dealings that may entrench Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that help maintain it. In September 2025, the UN Human Rights Office’s database listed 158 businesses involved in settlement-related activities. The same standard should apply to forced labour, and Toronto’s own “No Sweatshop” procurement policy already points the same way.

I want to be honest about the limits. City procurement must follow trade agreements that require open, non-discriminatory tendering, so a blanket boycott list would face legal challenge. What Toronto can do is publish clear human-rights criteria, require disclosure from contractors and City-assisted investors, and apply the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. That is what my petition asks for: No City of Toronto Contracts with Companies Profiting from Illegal Israeli Settlements.

Toronto is not for sale. It is open for investment.

There is a difference between a city that sells itself off and a city that builds. Toronto can attract billions without giving away public land, public assets or its residents’ future.

The interest is already there. Thousands of companies are already in Toronto Global’s pipeline. What they need is a city that answers the phone, approves on time, keeps its infrastructure standing and lets its people afford to live where they work.

That is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership problem. And it can be fixed.

Dr. Bahira Abdulsalam, PhD, P.Eng.
Founder, Be The Change Movement · bahira.ca

Sources

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