Fixing Toronto’s Budget Failure

The C.D. Howe Institute just gave the City of Toronto an ‘F’ for its budgeting process.

The Institute noted that this just isn’t a problem for Toronto, but is endemic in municipalities across the country:

How much does your municipal government plan to spend this year? How much did it spend last year? How does what it spent last year compare to what it said it would spend?

These should be simple questions for taxpayers, councillors and local media to answer. But in every major Canadian city, finding the answers is anything but. The unsatisfactory nature of municipal financial reporting is a serious problem, and not only for accountants. Inconsistent presentations and dense budget books hamper the ability of legislators, ratepayers and voters to hold their municipal governments to account. (p. 2)

But Toronto (along with Winnipeg), got singled out for an ‘F’ rating. And with that rating, the Institute noted just how egregiously bad the city has been with it’s presentation of budget information.

These two cities provide little information in reader-friendly form. Key totals are buried deep in their documents. Toronto also does not publish its end-of-year financial reports until well into the next fiscal year. Neither city presents its budget on the same accounting basis as its financial report. Toronto’s reconciliation table contains budget numbers that do not match the numbers in the budget itself. (p.5)

This doesn’t come as news to anyone who’s tried to explore and understand the city budget.

It particularly doesn’t come as news to members of Toronto’s Civic Tech community. This diverse group of engaged citizens, activists and technologists have wrestled for a number of years now with finding ways to make government — in our city, province and country — more open and accessible to all citizens. With or without the involvement of the governments themselves.

One of the most exciting projects on this front is Budgetpedia: a web app with the goal of opening up Toronto’s opaque budget.

The project is led by Henrik Bechmann — a long-time software developer and civic activist. But it’s grown with the involvement of nearly a hundred different Civic Tech community members over the past year and a half.

Budgetpedia is launching in a preliminary version (0.10) on Tuesday November 29, with an interactive budget explorer that allows you to visualize Toronto’s budget in a number of ways:

• Compare trends in departments over time
• Compare year-to-year spending, controlled for population and/or inflation
• Drill down into categories (as far as the data will let you go) and see how the city is spending, or where revenue is coming from
• Look at staffing levels; compare them over time and identify trends

Getting here has been a struggle. We’ve dealt with the opaque budgets that the C.D. Howe Institute calls out. We’ve scraped information that’s only available in pdf form. We’ve categorized data that has been dumped online with little explanation and help. And finally, we’ve put all this together into an interface that helps demystify all this for interested citizens.

There’s a long way to go still — both for Toronto and for municipalities across the province. Budgetpedia v 0.10 is a first step in opening Toronto’s budget.

Join us Tuesday at CivicTechTO to find out more, and help us turn Toronto’s civic failure into a citizen-led success!