2026 City Budget Deputation

YWCA Toronto
Oral Presentation to the City of Toronto's Budget Subcommittee
January 21, 2026

Good afternoon, my name is Sami Pritchard, and I am the Director of Advocacy and Communications at YWCA Toronto, which is the city’s largest multi-service organization serving women, girls and gender diverse people.

Every day, we see how government budget and policy decisions impact whether families can stay housed, escape violence, access quality child care, or secure stable employment.

Across the city, from Etobicoke to Scarborough, more than 13,000 people turn to our program and services for support to rebuild their lives. Much of this is made possible because of our strong partnership with the City, and for that, we are thankful.

We want to express our gratitude for safeguarding and expanding essential services under extraordinary fiscal pressure. Investments in poverty reduction, TTC fare capping, wheel-trans services, service hour extensions, and expanded social and crisis support programming are all welcomed.

At the same time, our dedication to the best possible outcome for Torontonians leads us to offer several observations, grounded in a gender equity lens, on what is needed to improve and strengthen our communities.

Women, especially single mothers, racialized women, and survivors of gender-based violence, experience some of the deepest housing precarity in the city. As Toronto’s largest gendered housing provider, we see how critical eviction prevention supports like the EPIC program and the Rent Bank are.

We want to acknowledge the City’s leadership on measures like the renoviction bylaw, especially when provincial action has fallen short. But the reality is, we are losing affordable homes far faster than we can build them.

Every time a building is privately sold, rents skyrocket, and people get displaced. This is why strengthening and expanding the MURA program is so important – bringing existing buildings into non-market ownership is one of the best ways to keep people housed.

We know the City cannot solve the housing and homelessness crisis alone, and we support your advocacy for the long-term investments that must come from the Ontario and the federal government.

I also want to speak to the interconnected crisis of intimate partner and gender-based violence. We are grateful for the staff resources the City has dedicated to working with the IPV/GBV Working Group, and for the leadership and partnership shown by Councillor Cheng and her team. But despite the City declaring gender-based violence an epidemic, we have not yet seen new dedicated funding attached to that commitment. Community partners have stepped up to support the City’s work, but without sustained investment, we worry about what will happen to this momentum without stable, long-term funding.

Housing is only one part of what families need to thrive.

When child care is unavailable or unaffordable, parents, especially single parents, are forced to reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely. Unfortunately, the 2026 budget does not include the municipal-level investments needed to support existing child care providers.

Our child care reconciliations dating back to 2023 are still outstanding, and we have recently learned that the 2025 audit guidelines will not be released until Q1 2026, after our annual audit is complete. These timing issues, along with uncertainty about whether retroactive salary costs from April to December 2024 will be reimbursed, make it difficult to plan and stabilize our child care operations. We are asking for support that helps streamline and move these processes along so that we can focus on what matters most – caring for children and supporting families who rely on us.

This week is emergency shelter and homeless service worker appreciation week – and it could not be more timely. In our shelters, we continue to see the toll that low wages and the growing complexity of needs take on the very people who hold this system together. Community-operated frontline shelter staff, who are predominantly racialized women, cannot sustain themselves on our current wages. Organizations like ours are losing talented workers to the city because our funding does not allow us to offer comparable wages. We are grateful for the City’s $7 million in enhancement funding for community-operated shelters, and we urge you to maintain or increase it to $8 million, with consideration for our shelter managers and support staff who are not currently included.

Finally, I want to touch on non-profit sustainability. While the CPIP inflationary increase is welcome, inflation, particularly in wages and rent, is still eroding our capacity. Nonprofits are essential partners delivering critical services across this city. We encourage Council to build on the positive groundwork of this budget by making strategic investments in housing, child care, wage enhancement, and nonprofit partners, guided by lived experience and an intersectional gendered lens. When women and caregivers are supported, entire communities thrive.

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to working together toward a more just and equitable Toronto.

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Sami Pritchard is the Director of Advocacy and Communications at YWCA Toronto