The response#
The published response, made once. Three levels of government publish a response to the conditions in this study — and each one counts differently and talks differently: in its own units, on its own year basis.
Key finding
Toronto publishes no youth total.
| Level | Program — and the figure it publishes | What it reports |
|---|---|---|
| City of Toronto | SafeTO — $43M (2025) | Dollars allocated |
| City of Toronto | Community Partnership and Investment Program (CPIP) grants — $33.4M (2026) | Dollars allocated |
| City of Toronto | Youth Hubs (Toronto Public Library) — 129,000 teen visits (Jan–Aug 2025) | Total visits — repeat visits counted; not unique youth |
| City of Toronto | Toronto Community Crisis Service — 17,000+ calls (2025) | Calls |
| Ontario | Before/after-school licensing — 40,943 spaces (Dec 2025) | Spaces licensed |
| Ontario | Youth Opportunities Fund — no Toronto total published | Not published |
| Ontario | Ontario After School Program — Toronto share not published | Not published |
| Canada | Youth Employment and Skills Strategy — no Toronto figure published | Not published |
| Canada | Canada Summer Jobs — no Toronto figure published | Not published |
Where the money overlaps: SafeTO's $5M youth-violence component sits inside the Social Development budget that also carries the CPIP grants, so those two rows share money and cannot be added. The full program table is printed in the Technical Appendix. No row publishes whether a young person's life improved.
The City
SafeTO, the City's community safety and well-being plan, was funded at $43 million in calendar 2025 and $49 million in calendar 2026, nominal. Each total includes a $5 million component for youth violence prevention in that year — inside the total, not in addition to it. Social Development, the division that runs SafeTO and the City's main community grants, had a gross budget of $157.3 million in calendar 2026. Inside it, the Community Safety & Well-Being service line was $50.7 million and the Community Partnership and Investment Program was $33.4 million. The division publishes no youth or after-school slice of that grants program.
Toronto Public Library's Youth Hubs numbered 31 in calendar 2025 and recorded 129,000 teen visits in January–August 2025. Visits are the published unit: a teenager who comes back is counted again. The Toronto Community Crisis Service received more than 17,000 calls in calendar 2025, resulting in over 14,000 dispatches. It has no standalone published budget. The Toronto Youth Equity Strategy, adopted in 2014, was last accounted for in a January 2020 briefing note — $103.3 million invested over calendar 2015–2019. No standalone reporting was found after that date.
Ontario & Canada
Toronto had 40,943 licensed before- and after-school spaces in December 2025. That is licensed capacity — spaces licensed to exist. It is not registrations and not children enrolled; Ontario publishes no enrolment figure. The Youth Opportunities Fund carries an Ontario allocation of $16.8 million per year; in fiscal 2024–25, $13.4 million was awarded to 38 projects, and the fund publishes no Toronto total. The Ontario After School Program runs on $14.6 million per year province-wide, reaching about 13,000 children and youth per year province-wide. Toronto's share — budget, sites, participants — appears nowhere in the published record.
Canada's Youth Employment and Skills Strategy serves youth aged 15–30; no Toronto allocation or participant total is published. Canada Summer Jobs recorded more than 75,000 jobs created, Canada-wide, in summer 2025. No Toronto total for Canada Summer Jobs is published.
Take it apart: Toronto's ≈$236 per resident aged 5–24
The spine figure of the response — an upper bound, printed with its workings. Tap each part to see exactly what it is and what it is not.
Start with what went into the number. The top figure is the Social Development division's whole budget — $137.3 million — and most of it is not youth money: in the published record, only about $10 million of it is pinned to youth. Count all of it as youth spending and the result is too high by construction, so ≈$236 is an upper bound — the most it could be — not the amount. The bottom figure is 581,210 — every resident aged 5 to 24 in the City of Toronto in the 2021 Census. A 2025 budget divided by a 2021 head count: if there are more young people in Toronto now, the real figure per person is lower still. The study prints it with that caveat. The division's money is ≈89–95% the City's own, and the whole budget is 0.73% of the City of Toronto operating budget. One finding runs through all three levels of government: the published totals stop one level above youth.
The same yardstick was attempted for every city: a published youth-serving department or function budget, divided by its residents aged 5–24, converted at US$1 = C$1.40 and £1 = C$1.88 (November 5, 2026) where a figure crosses a border — but each city's budget basis differs, so the bars are not like-for-like where flagged. New York: ≈$1,113 (denominator 1,904,234 residents aged 5–24). San Francisco: ≈$2,510 for its Children & Youth Fund only. Seattle: ≈$1,126. Bogotá: ≈$352. Mexico City: ≈$538, printed with a federal-transfer caveat. Vancouver: ≈$191 broad, or $117–$125 narrow. London (UK): ≈$89 gross, on a narrower line than the other rows. Los Angeles: ≈$72 — city tier only, since the County runs most social services there. Chicago's ≈$2,042 is not like-for-like — its department bundles functions spread across five Toronto divisions and is ≈80% senior-government grant-funded — so it is printed for completeness and not compared with the other rows. Montreal's figure is not published. The bars are not measured the same way: each city counts a different bundle of services, so read them as orders of magnitude, not a league table.
The after-school ledger is printed in full in the block directly below this panel — it is kept there as the single copy, and is not repeated here.
One note on the two budgets printed at this stop: the ≈$236 figure uses the division's 2025 budget ($137.3 million), because 2025 is the year the study's field comparison is built on. The same stop prints the larger 2026 gross budget ($157.3 million). The figure is not restated on the newer budget, because pairing a newer budget with the 2021 Census count would push it up for the same reason it is already an upper bound.
The after-school ledger
Published. Strictly published, like-for-like components total $17.3–22.3 million per year — $22.3 million, or $17.3 million, because no City document states whether the Summer Safety Plan's $5 million and SafeTO's $5 million youth-violence-prevention component are the same $5 million counted once or two counted separately; the study prints both and presents neither as resolved.
Modelled. Two modelled components sit apart from the published tier: Youth Hubs at approximately $9.2 million per year, and the Toronto share of the Ontario After School Program at $2.2–$3.7 million per year. With them, the modelled-inclusive total is approximately $29–35 million per year.
Of the provision counted in the ledger, about 1,800 places are guaranteed places — the After-School Recreation and Care registered places in 2025, for ages 6–12 — in a city with 234,408 children aged 5 to 13. Licensed capacity and visits are not converted into places, and are not added to that figure.
Figure 9 — Published youth budget per resident aged 5–24, Toronto in the field
Los Angeles: city tier only. Chicago (≈$2,042) is not plotted: ≈80% senior-government grant-funded — not like-for-like.
Basis: each bar is that city’s total published youth-department or function budget — all funding sources combined, not municipal own-source dollars only — divided by residents aged 5–24. The mix behind each bar differs: Toronto’s bar is ≈89–95% City own-source money; Chicago’s ≈$2,042 (not plotted as comparable) is ≈80% senior-government grants, not like-for-like. The full per-city funding mix is in the Technical Appendix, Chapter 20.
*San Francisco: Children & Youth Fund only. †Vancouver: broad; $117–$125 narrow. ‡London: gross, on a narrower line than the other rows. §Los Angeles: city tier only. Chicago (≈$2,042) is not plotted as comparable — not like-for-like, ≈80% grant-funded. Montreal: not published. Toronto's figure is an upper bound: the division's full gross budget, most of it not youth-specific. The cities at or above New York's level on comparable scope — Seattle and San Francisco — fund the commitment through dedicated revenue: a voter-approved levy, a charter-mandated set-aside. New York, Toronto and Vancouver fund through annual general-fund appropriation, which re-competes every year.
Source: published departmental and function budgets as cited in Chapter 20 of the Technical Appendix; 2021 Census denominators. Full table and caveats: Chapter 20 of the Technical Appendix.
The proof — the City's own count#
The response, as published, can also be tested against the City's own attempts to count it. Twice — in 2021 and again in 2025 — the City made a list of its own youth programs.
| City inventory | Programs counted | Budgets published | Outcomes published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Youth Program Inventory (2021) | 47 | None | None |
| Youth Jobs Inventory (2025) | 40 | None | None |
Read the two rows side by side: each inventory counts the programs carefully, then stops at the same two fields — what the programs cost, and what they changed.
2021The Youth Program Inventory
Published in June 2021 as part of the Youth Service Review, Investing in Youth Outcomes, it lists 47 programs and program categories for young people aged 12 to 29, across eight divisions, agencies and corporations, from Parks, Forestry and Recreation to the Toronto Police Service. For 46 of the 47 it gives a reach figure — participants served per year — but the figures rest on mixed bases: some count 2019, some 2020, some 2021; some are estimates; some count visits and others contacts, so they cannot be added into a single reach total. A full reading of the document finds no budget figure in it for any program. Results are absent in the same way: programs are filed under the outcome areas of the Youth Outcomes Framework, but the inventory carries no outcome or results field. By the review's own design it covers only programs the City delivers directly or in partnership, so the grants field sits outside it entirely.
2025The Youth Jobs Inventory
Four years later the City counted again, this time jobs only. The Youth Jobs Inventory, adopted with Reducing Barriers to Youth Employment in December 2025, lists 40 youth employment programs across ten organizations, and its one reach column records more than 16,000 young people employed in 2025. The pattern repeats: no budget column and no dollar figure in the attachment, no target ages program by program, and no field for outcomes, retention or completion. The staff report carrying it names the underlying problem in its own words — "limited and inconsistent data collection" makes it "difficult to track outcomes, identify who is being left out, and scale what is working."
The first test of the new duty
Council, by amendment, directed Social Development's Executive Director to report to the Economic and Community Development Committee on the progress and outcomes of the Youth Employment Table on May 5, 2026, and annually after that: a standing duty to report outcomes, set by Council itself. The first report under that duty has since arrived. It came as item 2026.EC29.10, dated May 26, 2026 — three weeks after the date Council set — bundled with a second subject, the Diversity Youth Fellowship Program, and the committee received it for information on June 9, 2026. For the Table, it reports a projected 2,800 new opportunities identified across the City and its partners, and counts of activity from January to May 2026: 11 career and job-fair events engaging 1,085 young people, providing 250 job opportunities. No numeric target set by the Table appears in the item's published summary, and no outcomes series — no placements achieved, no retention, no wages — appears in the summary or in the report's case-study attachment. (The report body and its framework attachment could not be retrieved for this study; the absence is stated for the published summary and attachments read.) The first test of the new duty produced a projection and a count of events.
The framework. The Youth Outcomes Framework, adopted with the 2021 guide, was built to close the outcomes gap: shared outcome areas and survey-based measures that City youth programs would choose from and report against. Five years on, the published record shows the machinery and not its output — no program-by-program measures, no aggregated percentages, no list of the programs applying it. Figures in circulation that credit the framework with application across 23 programs in six divisions, with 2,811 young people providing survey feedback, could not be verified in any published City document.
Outcomes across the register. For this study, the City's youth effort was enumerated program by program — roughly sixty programs and funding streams across the divisions, Toronto Public Library and Toronto Community Housing. Published outcome measures — evidence that a program changed something for the young people in it, rather than a count of money spent or people reached — exist for five of them: the Community Healing Project; the library's Leading to Reading; the Scarborough youth subset of FOCUS Toronto; Toronto Community Housing's Pre-Apprenticeship; and the Toronto Youth Job Corps, whose contract carries targets and a published history. The rest publish budgets, counts, or neither. The full register is printed in the Technical Appendix.
One floor, not a total. In the Community Funding Unit's 2024 reporting, the lines the City itself labels youth sum to $6,140,520, or 21.7 per cent of that unit's 2024 allocations. That is a floor for one year of one funding universe. It is not a youth total, and it cannot grow into one: the published recipient lists record organization, ward and amount, with no field for purpose or age.
Neither inventory was produced for this study, and neither was built to test it. Each is the City organizing its own youth effort for its own purposes — and each reproduces, inside the City's own paperwork, the pattern the published response shows from outside: programs counted, reach counted in units that cannot be combined, and the money and the outcomes missing. The gap is not an artefact of looking from outside. It sits in the instruments the City wrote for itself.