Construyendo Poder Juntos

City Councillors should be present, deeply knowledgeable about ward level and city-wide issues, and should always work in the public interest.

• Jennie's council office will host rotating office hours at pop-up office locations throughout the ward to meet residents where they are. The times and locations will be clearly communicated to residents in advance.

• The Council office will set and adhere to service standards for constituent emails and phone calls. 

• Jennie will be here. Committed to the community and to her role as city councillor, you won’t have to call the mayor’s office or chase her for a response.

• Jennie’s office will have caseworkers to support residents navigating the bureaucracy of public programs. Whether it's signing your kids up for swimming lessons or applying for property tax relief, we’re here to help! 

Across Toronto residents and cultural hub tenants are being displaced. This happens because city-led planning processes often treat community expertise as an optional, rather than integral, part of the planning process. Community led planning is where residents identify neighbourhood needs, build consensus around local priorities, and directs resources towards solutions that prioritize human dignity and access for all.

Community Led Planning

• Jennie will vote in support of funding community-led planning projects in 15 neighbourhoods in the 2027 budget. And she will support scaling investment into all 158 neighbourhoods by 2030.

• Jennie will work with City staff to develop more meaningful and in-depth public engagement practices that meet the needs of residents.

• Jennie will work to ensure that any funds allocated to community led planning initiatives are governed through participatory budgeting and with neighbourhood-level resident leadership at the helm.

• Jennie commits to a co-design model that foregrounds resident voices in the development of community-led planning programs in Beaches-East York.

Inclusive Economic Development

• Toronto can do more to ensure that our city's economy benefits more residents. As a large employer, purchaser, builder, landowner and funder, the City of Toronto needs to ensure that economic activity is shared more equitably across our communities.

• Jennie will work to improve access to decent employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for low-income residents, particularly women, youth, and those facing systemic barriers to work.

• She will support providing sufficient funding to ensure that workers within City funded non-profit organizations earn a living wage and she will work to expand the City's fair wage policy.

• Jennie will work to create the conditions that communities and workers need to build wealth including through supporting policies and programs that enable communities to own land, housing, and other infrastructure, and she will support communities having greater control over local economic decisions such as how communities and local businesses can benefit from development in our neighbourhoods.

• Jennie will support the development of community land trusts worker cooperatives, credit unions, and non-profit and public ownership models of businesses in Beaches-East York.

Participatory Budgeting (PB)

• Participatory budgeting is when community members come together to decide how to spend public money.

• Jennie will work in community to implement PB that empowers residents in Beaches-East York to lead projects at the neighbourhood level. This is not new, Ward 17 Don Valley North has been running community led budget processes since 2015. Ward 13 Toronto Centre has also been doing participatory budgeting for the past four years.

• Participatory budgeting projects in Toronto have included art installations, park improvements, new off-leash dog areas, updated playgrounds, and other public realm improvements. This is a good start but PB has the potential to have more significant impacts once additional capacity is built.

• Jennie will support the expansion of the City's current PB framework to broaden the types of projects it can fund and build capacity at the neighbourhood level.

Small businesses create lasting economic and social benefits for the communities and neighbourhoods they serve. Yet 48% of Canadian small business owners are set to retire in the next 5 years and only one in 10 small business owners have a formal succession plan.

Small businesses also face a host of challenges in the current climate: complex zoning rules, no above guideline rent increase protections for commercial renters, tariff pressures, and staff attrition.

Evidence Based Decision Making

• Jennie will introduce a motion at Council to create a city-wide database of vacant and abandoned commercial properties to study how and why commercial spaces are left vacant.

• Jennie will introduce a ward-wide annual small business survey to gather ward specific data about the state of small business in Beaches-East York.

Succession Planning for Small Business

• Jennie will engage with provincial organizations like Succession Ontario and federal resources to raise awareness of the issues surrounding succession planning.

• Jennie's constituency office will serve as a resource and outreach hub to collaborate with local small business owners and share knowledge about community ownership of small businesses (like co-operatives and employee ownership) to keep local businesses in operation.

• Jennie will work to get fund matching for the Toronto Business Enterprise Centre to expand one-on-one succession planning support for Beaches-East York businesses.

Reducing Vacant Storefronts and Improving Our Streetscapes

• Jennie will work to make streetscape improvement resources currently only available to Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) accessible to any collection of commercial businesses on an application basis.

• Jennie will engage the province of Ontario on options to implement a Vacant Storefront Tax in areas with demonstrated tenant demand for commercial real estate or evidence of land-banking by investors.

Keeping the TTC Affordable and Public

• Jennie will work to lower the fare capping threshold so you can ride for free after 40 trips, instead of the current 47 trips.

• Jennie supports maintaining the current transit fare freeze, bringing costs down for transit users.

• Jennie will never support distance based or "zoned" fares, make your ride more affordable.

• Jennie will advocate to expand the RapidTO Surface Transit Network Plan to streets in BEY, getting you where you need to go even quicker.

• Jennie will support a commercial parking levy to provide stable funding for TTC operations.

• Jennie will work to ensure the TTC remains a public service and will defend Toronto's rights to make our own decisions about our public transit system and in the best interest of riders.

We know what needs to happen in order to slow climate change and reduce our devastating reliance on fossil fuels. We need to put our priorities in line with our principles, and make environmental impacts and climate justice the deciding factors in every area of city building. We must not only transform our TransformTO Climate Plan, with a stronger focus on implementation, binding targets, and systems transformation; we must also ensure that this transformed, binding plan becomes part of how we do pretty much everything.

Here are some of my climate priorities:

Green building: all new City of Toronto builds should be designed and built for net-zero emissions, using renewable sources of energy for building, and meet the City’s Green Standards;

Robust, efficient public transportation, so that individuals and families can choose public transportation at least some of the time;

Walkable neighbourhoods, with amenities within easy walking distance, so that people who are able to can choose to take fewer trips in the car;

Completing our cycling network, so that residents can choose to cycle at least some of the time;

A carbon budget for the City of Toronto, incorporated into the City’s Official Plan;

An emphasis on renewable energy, not only in individual homes, but in multi-unit residential buildings, industrial sites, and public buildings; 

Shutting down the Portlands gas plant; 

Formally designating climate vulnerability areas, such as Taylor-Massey – neighbourhoods with high poverty rates, poor tree canopy, and high exposure to extreme heat – and prioritizing these areas for climate investment; and

Protecting and increasing the tree canopy. 

While this seems like a laundry list, the key here is not piecemeal climate-friendly initiatives. Rather, we need to turbo-charge our TransformTO plan, so that it is comprehensive, robust, and outcome-focussed.