Delayed & underfunded: Brampton’s budgets expose Patrick Brown’s disastrous leadership 

The City of Brampton is set to finally release its 2025 Budget tomorrow, months after other municipalities across Ontario. Here’s what we know. 

According to the interim financial master plan prepared for the City, the municipality needs to approve, at minimum, an approximately 3.4 percent property tax increase. This is without considering other critical pressures facing Brampton, including long-term infrastructure needs for key services like transit, investment into the decaying downtown, including the long delayed Riverwalk project to unlock potential growth in the area; and other initiatives promised by Mayor Patrick Brown, like a new world-class cricket stadium, a standalone university and a light rail train system into the city.  

Public consultations with residents across all 10 wards will begin next week, with dates and venues confirmed for most wards. According to the City of Brampton’s 2025 budget website, special council meetings for budget discussions will occur the week after the budget release, possibly between January 13 and January 21 (as needed).

Bramptonians will have the opportunity to provide input on the budget during the following consultation sessions:

• Wards 7 & 8 - Monday, January 13, 3:30 p.m.: D SPOT Dessert Cafe: 9045 Airport Road
• Wards 1 & 5 - Tuesday, January 14, 6:00 p.m.: Fan'D'Flame, 30 Gillingham Drive, Unit #503
• Wards 2 & 6 - Wednesday, January 15, 7:00 p.m.: Faith Gospel Church, Salvation Rd
• Wards 3 & 4 - Saturday, January 18, 9:00 a.m.: Susan Fennell Sportsplex, Youth Hub, 500 Ray Lawson Blvd.
• Wards 9 & 10 - Saturday, January 18, 11:00 a.m.: Save Max Sports Centre, Room #1, 1495 Sandalwood Pkwy. E.

In addition to public consultations, the City of Brampton has scheduled a Business Round Table on Tuesday, January 14, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

The scheduled sessions come after months of radio silence from the municipality on the progress of its 2025 budget. While Mississauga provisionally approved its 2025 budget at the end of November and Caledon released its budget in mid-December, Brown, who is responsible for the budget under the new Strong Mayor rules approved by the provincial government, had provided no clear indication of when he would release the financial plan for 2025. It seems that under his leadership the budget committee, which was responsible for allowing local input, deliberating on various decisions to determine community priorities and the establishment of a financial plan for the upcoming year, has been eliminated in an unprecedented erosion of transparency and accountability.

Brown, with a council now under his thumb, and Strong Mayor powers granted by Doug Ford’s PC government, can effectively do whatever he wants with the taxpayers’ money.

While he claims to be fiscally conservative, cancelling and postponing desperately needed city building projects and limiting key services, the city’s taxpayers continue to fund a bloated non-union staff complement used round the clock to promote Brown through social media, extensive events and on various mainstream media platforms. Lavish trips around the world for council members and senior staff have raised questions about abusive spending on what amounts to little more than perks doled out by the mayor. Costs associated with legal battles and a revolving door hiring approach to control who is loyal to Brown have also cost local taxpayers millions of dollars, while they question poor transit service, the lack of job creation, the failure to launch a standalone university Brown promised, the absence of a world class cricket stadium he vowed would be completed three years ago (he has committed zero funding for it) and the downward spiral of the city centre.

Numerous key initiatives have been ignored in the country’s ninth largest city which routinely makes headlines on mainstream media outlets for crime and other problems facing Brampton due to a lack of investment.

The Globe and Mail recently released a study of the 100 most livable Canadian cities in 2024 with a population of more than 10,000 using criteria such as housing, healthcare, safety, education and community amenities. A number of GTA municipalities made the list including Mississauga, Toronto, Richmond Hill, Oakville (the highest ranked among the GTA at number 10), Whitby, Burlington, Vaughan, Pickering, Newmarket, Ajax, Markham, Milton and Halton Hills. 

They were highlighted for the investments made to keep existing residents happy and attract new ones. Brampton did not make the list.

Critics have pointed directly at Brown, who promised in 2018 to cut key investments in the name of keeping budgets flat, to be “fiscally” responsible.

His leadership has left many questioning if that’s the case.  

Voting records and council meetings this term show that after the 2022 election—when four of the six former councillors who challenged what they described as Brown’s undemocratic leadership (they launched a half-dozen investigations into actions taken under his authority; but he cancelled all of them) did not return—Brown has run the City with an iron fist with no opposition to any of his priorities. 

He is frequently out of the city or country, has dramatically reduced the number of council meetings when Brampton’s business is supposed to be taken care of and has overseen the transformation of agendas meant to be packed with legislative information into little more than thin ceremonial documents with hardly any information about the decisions being made to run Canada’s ninth largest city. 

There is hardly any council debate on key issues regarding the way taxpayers’ money is being spent and the priorities of residents. For example, the budget process no longer is done through a budget committee, and extensive public consultations that are supposed to be done with residents ahead of the new year, were not even scheduled in 2024. 

The budget document is supposed to tell taxpayers exactly where all of their money is going, what the priorities are for the city and how elected officials responsible for serving the residents who put them on council are performing their only duty—to run Brampton the way the voters want.

Instead, by the second week of January the city’s residents still have not even seen one word of the 2025 budget document Brown is now supposed to put together.

They will have to wait until tomorrow to find out if the mayor has explained any of the following:

• what happened to the world class cricket stadium he promised six years ago and where is the money, according to previous staff reports (at least $35 million), that was supposed to have been budgeted for the project years ago;
• what is being done to raise the remaining share of the $125 million City Hall is supposed to provide for the expansion of Peel Memorial into an actual hospital (which Brampton residents have been waiting almost two decades for);
• what is the status of the $2.8 billion tunnelled LRT into the city centre which Brown claimed he had funding commitments for five years ago;
• what is being done to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed transit investments to transition the dirty diesel fleet to green buses and construct the required storage and maintenance facilities that were supposed to be built almost a decade ago (transit growth has been crippled because of Brown’s refusal to expand the budget);
• where is the more than $100 million needed to move forward with the Riverwalk project to finally redevelop the downtown core (federal funds were committed years ago but Brown has failed to match them with a required local share);
• where is the roughly $100 million needed for the downtown Brampton refurbishment, after Brown cancelled the Downtown Reimagined plan when he became mayor in 2018;
• what happened to the more than $600,000 Brown spent on friends of his and council ally Rowena Santos to bring a new standalone university to the city (senior staff found out the money was handed over despite little work being done, then Brown quietly walked away from the entire plan without explaining how the money was spent; he then cancelled an external investigation into the scandal);
• what is being done with more than $8 million that is supposed to be for unionized staff positions that are being kept vacant;
• why is Brown using taxpayer funds to buy up properties around the city centre area without any reporting out to council or taxpayers and no explanation of the plan;
• what happened to the promised downtown innovation district, which has been unfunded and dormant despite constant marketing and promotional claims of Brampton being transformed into a technology hub (much of the area has remained boarded up and empty for years with no timeline or plan for any redevelopment);
• what is Brown doing about the remaining investigations he cancelled, such as a probe of how the current integrity commissioner who had ties to the mayor, was hired and how contracts under his leadership were handed out;
• what is the status of hundreds of millions of dollars for new clean buses that were promised years ago;
• how is Brampton going to pay for downloaded services such as waste collection, roads, planning and water utilities that have been covered by the Region of Peel but are now slated to be transferred to City Hall? 

There are numerous other critical issues facing the city that have been ignored since Brown became mayor. Critics have pointed out that he has shown little interest in the city, having twice worked to get back into federal politics even while he was mayor, criss-crossing the country without taking a leave in 2022 to campaign around the clock for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership (he was eventually disqualified for allegedly violating federal campaign finance rules; he has denied the allegations) and working on Peter MacKay’s failed CPC leadership bid in 2020. Brown used city staff both times without disclosing his direction for them to work on the campaigns.  

Significant investments are needed to improve Brampton’s sustainability and service levels to meet the growing needs of users.

(Alexis Wright/The Pointer Files)

For decades, organizing Budget Committee meetings and scheduling public consultations in the spring, with final budget approval before Christmas, has been standard practice in Brampton. In election years, this typically occurred early in the new year. But since Brown was sworn in as mayor there have been ongoing governance issues, as well as a lack of transparency and accountability, culminating last term when a majority of Brampton Council members—Jeff Bowman, Martin Medeiros, Charmaine Williams, Gurpreet Dhillon, Doug Whillans, and Pat Fortini—described Brown as an “authoritarian” leader. They warned that democracy in Brampton was “under siege” due to Brown allegedly blocking votes and not allowing debate to move forward. They described that votes were often taken behind closed doors, preventing the public from having insight into key decision making about the use of their money.

The group of six councillors wrote in a blistering public letter in 2022 that Brampton taxpayers were “at risk from financial and administrative mismanagement”, describing Brown as an “authoritarian dictator”. 

“The current council has had to manage damning allegations of wrongdoing in contract procurements, investigations of improper hiring practices, and concerns over discrimination,” the letter highlighted. “We can no longer continue to stay quiet,” they wrote, vowing to take legislative action to confront Brown’s alarming behaviour. They warned that he increasingly did business and made decisions away from public view and the scrutiny of media.

The half-dozen external investigations they eventually launched, under the recommendation of Ontario’s Ombudsman, were later cancelled by Brown who called a snap meeting on a Friday afternoon with no notice at the end of August 2022 when he had just enough votes to torpedo them (it’s unclear why he and Santos voted on a matter that involved allegations against them which should have triggered conflict of interest rules). All five members who voted to cancel, including Brown, are still on council, joined by new members in 2022 who have fallen in line with the mayor (councillors Medeiros and Fortini have at times tried to raise concerns since then but have been unable to get motions passed with nine members, led by Brown, lined up against them). Ontario’s Ombudsman criticized the decision, but that did not stop Brown from lying about it, claiming the Ombudsman had cleared all the allegations of wrongdoing, which is blatantly false. The provincial watchdog stated in a letter that the investigations should be resumed to determine if wrongdoing had occurred. Brown has ignored the direction. 

Brampton’s precarious financial position is a direct result of Brown’s budget-freeze strategy, which has severely restricted the City’s ability to invest in critical infrastructure and public services. While these freezes were politically popular in his early tenure, residents have suffered with essential infrastructural projects in limbo, such as the Riverwalk flood mitigation initiative, the downtown extension of the Hurontario LRT and the long-promised expansion of Peel Memorial into a full-service hospital (Brown attempted to block a special levy to raise money for the desperately needed facility because it went against his claim while running for the CPC leadership in 2022 that he was the only mayor to keep budgets frozen). 

With the downloading of regional services, including roads and stormwater infrastructure, set to begin next year, Brampton is facing additional financial volatility. The City will assume responsibility for regional roads. It remains unclear if the 2025 budget will include any measures to prepare for the downloading.

Plans for a standalone university were undermined when Brown and Santos became embroiled in a controversy involving the handing over of $630,000 to their friends who were not qualified to do the work, raising concerns of potential conflict of interest. An external investigator released an interim report in 2022 that found their friends received certain benefits that others bidding for the work did not get. Santos’s friend was also paid for questionable international travel even before being awarded the contract and Brown’s close friend did not complete much of the work despite being paid three times what had been approved by council. 

The alarming mismanagement left the city without its own standalone university, which Brown and Santos promised for years.

Other neglected projects include plans for the city's transit system, which still relies on heavily polluting diesel buses despite false claims by Brown that Brampton leads the entire country in green transit. 

While he has crippled his own city’s services and infrastructure, Brown has been an aggressive proponent of the 23.3 percent increase requested by Peel Police for its 2025 budget, an increase that will put significant strain on his taxpayers who pay for policing through the same property bill which also covers the Region of Peel budget. He even suggested Peel police should consider hiring 600 new officers—double the proposed 300 for the coming year, which critics have called outrageous and nothing more than a money grab by police brass. 

Brown’s early years as mayor—when he was admittedly only interested in budget freezes because they made for good slogans as he planned to revive his national political career, later campaigning on a slogan of “balancing budgets” as a fiscal conservative—foreshadowed the crippling impact his reckless leadership would have on Brampton.

In 2019 alone, through his first budget as mayor, he cut or delayed $21.2 million in investments into key public works projects; $19.7 million in road works; $2.5 million in critical facility repairs and $600,000 in necessary bridge repairs. The following year, the cuts continued under Brown’s demands while he made numerous misleading claims about the capital budget, among them telling the public spending was increasing, when the capital budget had been cut by 41 percent from what was initially projected. 

What had been a projected $431 million investment in capital needs for 2020, before Brown took over control of the process, was cut down to $223 million, with critical projects and plans removed. He claimed investments were being increased but local business groups, councillors and residents called him out for the blatant attempt to mislead them. 

In an unprecedented move, Brown then eliminated the ten-year capital plan from the budget, making it impossible for the public to keep track of spending and see if responsible fiscal planning is a priority. 

Among the investments dropped were critical projects to allow the city’s transit system to meet rising ridership demand. Since his arrival in the city, widespread complaints have been received from residents forced to ride overcrowded buses while many routes suffer from a woeful lack of service.

The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of Brampton’s Interim Financial Master Plan from 2023 outlined several weaknesses and threats that could significantly impact Brampton’s fiscal outlook in the coming years. Among the weaknesses, the slow development of the Downtown Urban Growth Centre and a continued market preference for residential development in key areas have hindered the city’s urban and economic growth. The threats highlighted include increasing vehicular traffic, national economic challenges and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have reshaped workforce trends and dampened demand for new office space. In addition, competition from other, more successful GTA municipalities such as Mississauga immediately to the south, Oakville and Burlington to the west and Vaughan to the east, an aging population that requires expanded investments in recreation and transportation services and rising asset management obligations present substantial risks. 

Brampton families also suffer with no standalone university, as many are forced to send children elsewhere, despite election promises by Brown, who has failed to explain what happened to his abandoned Brampton University plan.

He has made no investments in local community housing plans and has ignored the dire lack of affordable units across the city which has caused the illegal rental market to explode, creating costly pressures on municipal services.

The report also warns of reliance on external infrastructure grant availability (Brown is fond of claiming other levels of government should pay for Brampton’s needs) and the adverse effects of Bill 23 passed by Doug Ford’s PC government, which mandates reduced development charges, threatening revenues essential for infrastructure investments. Climate change, stricter environmental regulations and the need for substantial infrastructure projects which have been drastically underfunded, such as the Riverwalk flood mitigation initiative, further exacerbate the city’s challenges.

In 2024, the City said investments in transit projects, including approximately $89.7 million earmarked for fleet expansion and replacement and an additional $15.5 million for bus refurbishments, would be coming. Other planned spending that is long overdue included two major downtown revitalization initiatives with $4 million to improve Garden Square and $15 million for Ken Whillans Square (to be funded through debt); major improvements to Countryside Drive and Torbram Road in the amount of $12 million and $20 million, respectively; and $25.8 million for Brampton’s road resurfacing program. 

These projects are in desperate need of funding and any further failure to make the investments could result in much steeper costs down the road, possibly when Brown is no longer mayor (he has already twice tried to leave the city).

Brampton residents should find out Friday, January 10 if the 2025 budget transparently details how their money is being spent and whether or not the mayor cares about their priorities.

Email: [email protected]

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