Emerging Threats to the City of Kingston

Per the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Ontario households face one of the highest property tax burdens in Canada — roughly $2,200 per resident on average. Municipalities collect between eight and ten cents of every tax dollar raised at all levels of government, yet they own and operate roughly 60% of Canada's public infrastructure. The mismatch is not new, but it has widened sharply as the province has added municipal responsibilities — social housing, paramedics, parts of public health, climate adaptation — without adding the revenue tools to fund them.

Meanwhile, Ontario's per-capita program spending has been the lowest in Canada for years. AMO and more than 160 member councils have been asking the province for a joint Social and Economic Prosperity Review since 2024 to reset the framework. The province has not yet engaged.

The practical meaning for Kingston is that even if Council does everything right, the structural mismatch makes the problems below impossible to solve from property tax alone. Every threat that follows compounds on this foundation.

Since Strong Mayor powers were extended to Kingston in 2023, the City's annual budget is no longer originated by Council. Under the Municipal Act, the Mayor proposes the budget and Council can amend it but cannot replace it. The 2025 and 2026 budgets were both proposed by the Mayor's office.

This is not a debate about any individual mayor. It is a debate about which body deliberates on the most consequential document the City produces each year. Strong Mayor powers also include the ability to direct staff, propose certain bylaws unilaterally, and override some council votes. The cumulative effect is to weaken Council's traditional deliberative role at the moment when the threats on this page demand more deliberation, not less.

I have been clear that I believe the budget belongs to Council. The work of resetting this — through provincial advocacy, through Council's own procedural choices, and through public pressure — is ongoing.

This is the most under-discussed threat to Kingston and one of the most dangerous, because it is structural rather than episodic. The City's own 2024 Asset Management Plan and the consultant report delivered to Council in late 2024 lay out the numbers plainly. Roughly 40% of Kingston's municipal assets fall below the "fair or better" condition threshold — the City's 2025 asset reporting indicates 59.8% of assets were in fair or better condition. Annual capital investment needed to maintain current levels of service: $282.1 million. Annual capital actually budgeted for renewal: $78.7 million. Annual funding gap: $203.4 million.

Without intervention, the 10-year backlog reaches approximately $3 billion by 2035 — even under the Proposed Levels of Service scenario that adds $27 to 40 million per year. The City has a 1% infrastructure levy that could be raised, but doing so alone cannot close the gap. The honest reading is that Kingston cannot close this deficit without provincial fiscal-framework reform, dedicated growth-tied revenue, or service-level reductions. Probably some of all three.

Past Councils wisely instituted an urban boundary to discourage development outside of where city services already reach. That boundary is now under direct pressure. The Second Draft of the Official Plan, released for consultation in March 2026, reflects a land needs assessment indicating Kingston will require roughly 745 hectares of additional urban land by 2051 to accommodate projected growth to 220,000 residents. Public materials in spring 2026 discussed approximately 1,176 gross hectares in the proposed east and west growth areas. Six private applications for boundary expansion are already active, including a 62-hectare site at 1054 Highway 2.

The 2024 Provincial Planning Statement removed the comprehensive-review requirement, which means owners can now file expansion applications at any time, not only during Official Plan reviews. The pressure for sprawl is no longer episodic; it is continuous.

Every hectare of new greenfield development carries a long lifecycle deficit. Edmonton's well-documented 2011 analysis showed that 17 of 40 planned developments would create roughly $4 billion in lifetime cost overruns. The arithmetic in Kingston is not meaningfully different. Expanding the urban boundary while we cannot maintain existing infrastructure is taking on a second mortgage while the first one is already in default. I introduced a Life Cycle Fiscal Cost Benefit Analysis motion and a Cost of Carbon motion precisely to make these costs visible before decisions are made.

Where LCCH responds: Limestone City Co-operative Housing was designed from day one as deep intensification inside the existing urban boundary — a non-market, near-zero-carbon project on a footprint that takes existing services rather than extending new ones. It is the kind of infill that makes urban boundary expansion unnecessary.

In 2001, the City of Kingston assumed responsibility for public and social housing from the Province in its role as Service Manager. Under the Housing Services Act, 2011, the City is legislatively required to maintain a minimum of 2,003 rent-geared-to-income units. The catch: federal funding that partially supported this housing is winding down through "Step-Down Funding" as operating agreements expire when mortgages on social housing projects mature.

Federal contribution to Kingston, which has historically been in the range of several million dollars annually, is projected to decline to zero by 2035. The annual municipal subsidy required to sustain social housing operations is projected to roughly double over the same period, and capital backlog for social housing providers is projected to grow into the nine figures unless reinvestment is found. The province forced the obligation onto municipalities and the federal funding that helped offset it is being reduced to zero. That is what "downloading" looks like in slow motion.

Where LCCH responds: Co-operative housing is one of the few non-market models that does not depend on continuing municipal operating subsidy once built. The project would deliver permanently affordable housing at a financing structure that does not load the City's social-housing operating budget. It is precisely the kind of model that has to scale if Kingston is going to meet its non-market housing demand without making the 2035 cliff worse.

This is climate as a fiscal threat, not climate as an environmental issue. The City's own climate planning materials project that days above 30°C in Kingston will rise from about six per year today to as many as 48 by the 2050s. Stormwater systems, road surfaces, public buildings, and emergency services are all directly exposed.

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office's costing work on infrastructure and changing climate concluded that proactive adaptation is materially cheaper than reactive adaptation over a 50-year horizon — but every year of delay compounds the gap. Insurance industry reporting nationally indicates flood coverage is becoming harder to obtain in flood-exposed areas, and uninsurable property is a direct threat to a city's assessment base.

Kingston is developing a Climate Change Adaptation Plan with ICLEI Canada. It is not yet adopted. The cost of getting this wrong, or being slow, is measured in decades.

Where LCCH and GNCH respond: Both projects are designed with climate resilience built in, not bolted on. LCCH is a 200-year lifecycle design with near-zero operating emissions. Good Neighbours Co-Housing includes a Weathering Centre in every development — a community hub designed for the kind of chronic stress and acute climate events that are already moving through eastern Ontario.

Inflation cuts purchasing power. That much was true when I first wrote about it on this page. What has changed is that municipal cost inflation now runs persistently above headline consumer inflation — construction costs, insurance premiums, fleet and equipment, and skilled-labour wages have all outpaced CPI through 2022 to 2025. Cities pay these costs first; residents pay them next, through property taxes.

At the same time, Ontario property assessments have been frozen at January 1, 2016 values for nearly a decade. There has been no province-wide reassessment, and the province has given no firm timeline for when one will occur. This means the City's tax base is increasingly disconnected from current property values.

For households, the picture is harder. Ontario Works rates have been frozen at $733 per month for a single adult since 2018. Median wage growth has not kept pace with shelter and food costs in eastern Ontario. Inflation makes life harder for everyone, but especially for those on a fixed income or social assistance.

Kingston is on the leading edge of a demographic wave that is reshaping the whole western world. The Kingston Census Metropolitan Area is about 21% seniors today, above the Ontario average. Federal government demographic projections for the Kingston region indicate that by 2031, the share of seniors will rise meaningfully while the share of working-age adults will fall — both shifts larger than the provincial average.

The implications for the tax base are clear. Aggregate disposable income drops as more residents retire, which depresses business growth, lowers demand for property, and feeds back into assessment values and tax revenue. The implications for service demand are also clear. Health care, long-term care, accessible transit, and home-support services all rise as the median age rises.

Where GNCH responds: Good Neighbours Co-Housing is purpose-built for aging in place — compatibility-matching, shared spaces, support that comes to the home rather than requiring the resident to move. It is one of the few models that allows seniors to age in community without consuming long-term care capacity prematurely.

Three forces work against Kingston's labour market: retiring baby boomers, slower population growth at working ages, and automation. The third has changed shape since I first wrote about it. Generative AI is now visibly compressing wage growth in a range of white-collar occupations nationally — exactly the kind of work Kingston had hoped to attract. The same technology may eventually relieve some of the labour shortages on the lower end, but the transition will not be smooth, and it will not be local.

Kingston needs to plan for higher structural unemployment among educated mid-career workers concurrent with continuing labour shortages in trades, health care, and caregiving. The City's existing workforce development and youth employment strategies are useful but were not designed for this combination. We will need new tools.

Given that Kingston needs in-migration to maintain its tax base, anything that hinders people from coming here, or staying once they arrive, is an economic threat as well as a moral one. I wrote about this in What Kind of City Do We Want? and moved a council motion on reviewing City policies to update anti-racism policies. The work is not finished.

More importantly: do we want to live in a city where racism and intolerance thrive? I would hope not. The economic argument is true. It is also the smaller argument.

Queen's accounts for a large share of Kingston's economy, population, and rental market. Canadian universities are now navigating the structural revenue effects of the 2024 federal cap on international student permits, which began affecting enrolment in 2025 and 2026. Queen's has indicated that its own international allocation was comparable to recent application volumes, so the immediate impact may be limited — but the cap introduces new uncertainty into a sector that already faced cost pressures.

A meaningful decline in Queen's enrolment in future years would propagate through Kingston's housing market, retail sector, downtown vitality, and assessment base. Diversification — through other employment sectors, other forms of in-migration, and a more locally rooted residential base — is the most likely and durable response.

The earlier version of this page warned of population decline. The actual story turned out to be more complicated. The City of Kingston grew about 7% between 2016 and 2021 according to census counts, and the current planning estimate for the City of Kingston is approximately 153,000 residents. The Kingston Census Metropolitan Area is larger again, including South Frontenac, Frontenac Islands, and Loyalist Township.

But raw population growth masks a composition problem. We are growing at older ages, the working-age share is shrinking, and growth depends heavily on immigration policy that can be politically reversed. A city growing by retirees and shrinking by working-age adults faces almost all the same fiscal pressures as a city in raw decline — without the political clarity that decline would force.

In January 2025, Kingston City Council voted to declare a food insecurity emergency, joining Toronto and Mississauga in doing so. The numbers behind that declaration are sobering. KFL&A Public Health reported that roughly one in four households in the eastern Ontario region experienced food insecurity in 2023, up from one in six the year before. By the time Council declared the emergency, local advocates and councillors reported food insecurity in Kingston at roughly one in three households. Local agency reporting at the time indicated St. Vincent de Paul Kingston had served on the order of 46,000 meals in the previous year, compared to roughly 18,000 in 2019.

Across Ontario, food bank visits have grown sharply since 2019, and a significant share of users are employed. Ontario Works for a single adult remains $733 per month, unchanged since 2018. Food insecurity is technically a provincial income-support issue. The consequences — emergency room visits, school nutrition gaps, child welfare costs, mental health system load — fall on municipal and shared-system budgets regardless.

Where KFR and LCCH respond: Kingston Food Rescue is a direct response — moving surplus food from grocers, restaurants, and farms to community fridges, shelters, and the institutions that feed people who would otherwise go hungry. Limestone City Co-operative Housing's integrated commercial vertical farm is designed to build food security into the foundation of a housing project. Neither is enough on its own, but they are the kind of locally rooted infrastructure that has to scale.

Early signs of the opioid epidemic were brought to my attention in 2015. I moved the Patch4Patch Protocols motion and the Naloxone availability motion. Both passed. The crisis is now much bigger than expected — and Kingston is heading into a particularly fragile transition.

On April 10, 2026, the province announced that Kingston's Consumption and Treatment Services site at 661 Montreal Street will close on September 30, 2026, and that a Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hub will open at the same location on October 1, 2026, operated by AMHS-KFLA. On paper that sounds like continuity. In practice it is a fundamental change in model — from supervised consumption with low-barrier outreach to an abstinence-oriented framework — happening at the same address with a single day between them.

Putting a HART Hub at the address where the supervised consumption site stood is not unlike holding an AA meeting in a bar. The people the new model is designed to serve are the people the old model was already reaching, and the trust they had built was with the staff and program being shut down. International evidence is clear that supervised consumption saves lives. Removing it without a fully bridged replacement, in the same place, on the same day, is a setup that the evidence says is unlikely to succeed.

I have been working with frontline harm-reduction and community-health groups in Kingston on bridge-funding ideas, council motions, and public communication around what the transition actually requires. The right answer is the one the science has been telling us for a decade: housing first, low-barrier supports, dignity as a hard constraint, and harm-reduction infrastructure where people actually are.

The CTS transition is one symptom of a broader pattern. Family physician shortages are now acute enough that Council added $1 million to the 2026 budget specifically for physician recruitment. KFL&A Public Health has been merged with two other legacy units into the new South East Health Unit, which changes governance and reporting lines for surveillance and emergency response. Kingston's hospitals regularly operate at or near capacity.

Public health is the part of government that goes unnoticed when it is working and unmissable when it is not. The slow erosion of capacity here is hard to see year over year and very dangerous to compound. I served twelve years on the KFL&A Public Health board and sat on the committee that merged three legacy public-health units into the new South East Health Unit. We did it because it was the right structural move. The next stage of work is to make sure the merger does not become a quiet way of doing less with less.

Tick-borne Lyme disease has continued to expand in eastern Ontario. The Kingston area is at high risk, and we still do not have adequate testing, diagnosis, or treatment capacity for the growing number of strains. I moved a motion for a Lyme Research Network for exactly this reason; more will be needed.

Lyme is one example of a category. As Kingston's climate warms further, vector-borne diseases, heat-related illness, air-quality events, and water-quality events all rise. The Public Health and emergency-services budgets absorb these costs first; the rest of the City absorbs them second.

The Whig-Standard has shrunk dramatically over the past decade. Kingstonist and YGK News now carry much of the civic-affairs reporting load, with much smaller resources. Council meetings increasingly happen without sustained, professional press coverage — agendas are long, the issues are technical, and ordinary residents cannot reasonably be expected to follow without help.

Without a healthy local information ecosystem, residents cannot hold council accountable, and council cannot hear the public clearly enough to govern well. Every other threat on this page is made worse by this gap, because it is the public's understanding of these threats that creates the political conditions for action.

The Strong Mayor framework discussed in Section 1 is the visible top of this iceberg, coming from the provincial direction. Less visible but no less consequential is the way Council has changed its own rules, coming from the municipal direction.

On September 17, 2024, Council passed a revised Procedural Bylaw by a vote of 11 to 2, restricting how the public can participate in Council meetings. The new rules cap delegations at six per meeting, limit each councillor to adding only one additional public speaker per night (and only with a two-thirds affirmative vote), restrict the topics public delegations can address, and tighten speaking time. An attempt to refer the changes to the Administrative Policies Committee for further public consultation was defeated 8 to 5. The changes took effect January 1, 2025. Delegates who spoke against the bylaw called the changes "more than housekeeping matters" and a "sledgehammer approach."

The substantive pattern is similar. On June 17, 2025, Council voted 7 to 3 to remove the names "Indian Road," "Indian Road Parkette A," and "Indian Road Parkette B" from the civic address inventory before the consultation with Indigenous service organizations, First Nations, and affected residents had begun. I support consultation. I support changing the name if that is what the consultation produces. What I do not support is predetermining the outcome before the consultation begins — which is exactly what voting to remove the name first asks consultation to do. My amendment to allow the consultation process to determine whether renaming was the right answer was defeated 7 to 3.

Province above, Council below. The Strong Mayor powers concentrate authority at the head of the table. Council's own procedural changes narrow the space at the foot of it. Authoritarian habits at one level give cover to authoritarian habits at the other, and both work against the kind of city Kingston needs to become. The procedural and substantive examples point the same direction: less space for the public to participate, less space for deliberation, less tolerance for the possibility that the right answer may be different from the first-named one.

The antidote is not a complicated theory. In Helsinki I saw municipalities that treat dignity as a hard constraint, that co-design solutions with the people who will use them rather than for them, and that take a servant posture — government's job is to remove barriers and back what communities are already doing, not to gatekeep on every good idea. Servant leadership and co-design are the antidotes to authoritarian habits at every level. I will seek to implement them at every opportunity Council gives me.

Where KCW responds: Kingston City Works is, among other things, an existence proof — four councillors with very different politics agreeing that residents who report problems deserve answers. The civic responsiveness it provides is one specific kind of capacity. The broader capacity — for Council to deliberate, for the public to participate, for outcomes to emerge from process rather than be decreed before it — has to be defended by Council itself.