5,216 Hours of Toronto City Council, Analyzed

In 2021, Toronto’s city council mentioned housing 1,045 times across all meetings. By 2022, that number was 7,548. By 2024, it was over 11,000. A 10x increase in three years. Meanwhile, housing starts declined, rents hit record highs, and the shelter system overflowed into hotels.

That’s the story of Toronto in one stat: a city that talks more and more about its problems while the problems get worse.

We scraped every public transcript from Toronto’s city council and its 100+ committees: 1,764 meetings spanning February 2015 to April 2026. 38.3 million words. 5,200 hours. Every motion, every debate, every “point of order,” every “thank you very much.”

The transcripts come from tominutes.com. We packaged the full dataset on Hugging Face. What follows is what the data says about how Toronto governs, and whether it’s working.

Who’s Meeting?

City Council dominates with 303 meetings, but the real work happens in committees. The Executive Committee (110 meetings), Budget Committee (104), and the four community councils split across Toronto’s boroughs handle the bulk of day-to-day governance. There are over 100 unique committees in total, from the Board of Health to the FIFA World Cup 2026 Subcommittee.

The Marathon Sessions

The average Toronto city meeting runs 3.5 hours. The median is 2.9 hours, meaning half of all meetings are under three hours, but the other half drags the average up significantly. Some meetings run past 12 hours. The most common bracket is 2-4 hours (694 meetings), but a surprising 150 meetings went beyond 8 hours.

There’s a notable pattern: meetings were longest in 2015-2016 (averaging nearly 5 hours), dropped during 2018-2020, then climbed back up in 2021 when COVID restrictions eased and pent-up agenda items flooded council. The 2021 spike to 5.4 hours average is striking. Fewer meetings but each one packed with deferred business.

What Toronto Talks About

We tracked 10 major policy topics across every transcript using keyword analysis. Housing leads with 74,664 total mentions across 75% of all meetings. Budget and Tax discussions come second (60,951), followed by Transit (57,363). Toggle the topics below to see how the conversation has shifted over the past decade.

The most striking pattern is the massive dip across all topics in 2020-2021. COVID collapsed meeting frequency and shortened agendas. Then in 2022, everything surged back. Housing exploded from 7.7 mentions per meeting in 2021 to 74.7 in 2022, a 10x increase that reflects the housing affordability crisis dominating public discourse.

The Urgency Epidemic

Words like “urgent,” “emergency,” “crisis,” “critical,” “dire,” and “unprecedented” have become the background hum of Toronto governance. In 2017, councillors used urgency language about 26 times per meeting. By 2023, that number hit 47 words per meeting, nearly one every minute of a typical session. When everything is an emergency, nothing is.

The dip in 2018-2021 is real: the Ford-era council reset and COVID virtual meetings compressed everything. But the post-2022 surge is striking: when council returned to in-person sessions, it brought the vocabulary of permanent crisis with it. The 2023 peak of ~47 urgency words per meeting means the average councillor is hearing the word “crisis” or “emergency” roughly once every 60 seconds of debate. That’s not governing. That’s alarm fatigue.

The Housing Crisis in the Transcript

The housing data tells a story of escalating alarm without proportional action. In 2015, council mentioned housing about 3 times per meeting. By 2023, it was nearly 80 times per meeting. The word “shelter” alone went from background noise to a recurring emergency. “Affordable housing” has been said 8,250 times across 802 meetings. “Homelessness” appears in more transcripts every year.

And yet: average rent in Toronto crossed $2,800/month. Vacancy rates sit below 2%. Purpose-built rental housing starts declined. The transcripts read like a slow-motion alarm bell that nobody can turn off. Not because they don’t hear it, but because the levers to fix it sit in Queen’s Park and Ottawa, not City Hall.

The 6.2x multiplier is telling: meetings that run longest have 6.2 times more housing mentions than short ones. Housing doesn’t just dominate the conversation. It extends it. When housing comes up, council can’t stop talking. The question the transcripts can’t answer is whether all that talk has made a single unit more affordable.

The Encampment Crisis

Before 2020, encampments were a background issue in Toronto politics, mentioned roughly 20 times per meeting, scattered across park reports and shelter updates. Then COVID hit. Shelters reduced capacity. People moved into parks. And council could not stop talking about it. By 2024, encampment-related keywords (“encampment,” “tent,” “clearing,” “park clearing,” “eviction”) appeared 4,619 times, up from 584 in 2021. An 8x increase in three years.

The encampment conversation is a mirror of the housing conversation, just at the crisis end of the spectrum. When you can’t build enough housing, can’t fund enough shelters, and can’t prevent people from sleeping in parks, you end up debating park clearings instead of root causes. The 2020-2021 dip is misleading: virtual meetings compressed language, but the problem was exploding. When in-person sessions resumed, the floodgates opened. Council didn’t suddenly start caring about encampments in 2022. It just started having to say the word out loud again.

The Bike Lane Wars

Nothing in Toronto politics divides a room faster than bike lanes. Mentions exploded from 39 in 2019 to 563 in 2024: a 14x increase that tracks perfectly with the escalating conflict between the city and the province. What started as infrastructure planning became a culture war: the province passed legislation requiring its own approval for bike lanes on major roads, effectively overriding municipal authority. Council meetings turned into debates about jurisdiction, not just painted lines.

The first spike in 2016 was about building a cycling network. The 2024 spike was about whether the city even has the right to. That shift, from urban planning to constitutional power struggle, is visible in the data. In 2025, mentions dropped to 255: the debate moved from council chambers to courtrooms.

The Opioid Crisis in the Record

In 2017, opioid-related keywords (“overdose,” “safe injection,” “naloxone,” “fentanyl”) barely registered. Just 37 mentions all year. Then 2018 happened: 415 mentions, as the fentanyl crisis hit Toronto’s streets and supervised consumption sites became a flashpoint. Council debated, voted, opened sites. And then the conversation faded. By 2020, mentions dropped to 40. The crisis didn’t end. Council just moved on.

There’s a second spike in 2023-2024 (264 and 384 mentions respectively) as the opioid crisis merged with the encampment crisis and the shelter crisis into one overlapping emergency. But it never returned to 2018 levels. The pattern is instructive: council’s attention to the opioid crisis is reactive, not sustained. A wave of overdose deaths forces the conversation. Policy gets debated. Then the news cycle shifts, and the transcripts show the issue fading. Not because anyone solved it, but because something else became more urgent. In a city where everything is a crisis, the opioid emergency has to compete for airtime.

Transit Dreams, Deferred

No topic better captures Toronto’s governance dysfunction than transit. Four megaprojects have consumed billions of dollars in planning, decades of political capital, and thousands of hours of council time. The results? SmartTrack (1,239 mentions) was quietly folded into GO expansion after its champion resigned in scandal. The Scarborough Subway (286 mentions) has been debated since 2013 and isn’t open. The Eglinton Crosstown (186 mentions) was promised for 2020 and opened years late. The Ontario Line (911 mentions) is the new flagship, target date 2031, but nobody is holding their breath.

Combined, these four projects have been mentioned 2,622 times in council. That’s roughly 7 mentions per meeting about transit lines that mostly don’t exist yet. The cost of planning alone runs into the hundreds of millions. Toronto doesn’t have a transit plan problem. It has a transit execution problem. The transcripts are full of councillors asking for updates. The updates are always that it will take longer and cost more.

Developer vs Community

Every zoning debate in Toronto is a proxy war between two worldviews. The “developer frame” (density, height, towers, condos, development charges) represents the language of building. The “community frame” (neighbourhood character, community benefit, residents, livability, quality of life) represents the language of protecting what exists. We tracked both frames across every transcript. The result is a decade-long tug of war that neither side is winning.

The two lines track each other almost perfectly, which is the point: every time someone says “density,” someone else says “neighbourhood character.” But there’s a subtle shift happening. Before 2018, the community frame led slightly. council meetings were more likely to invoke residents and livability. Since 2018, the developer frame has pulled ahead, particularly in 2022-2023 as the housing crisis pushed council toward a “build more” posture. In 2024, they converged again: 3,445 developer-frame mentions vs 3,507 community-frame mentions. Toronto’s council is perfectly balanced between building and blocking, which may explain why so little actually gets built.

How Council Speaks

Toronto City Council has a very particular way of speaking. Every interaction is filtered through formal parliamentary procedure. Councillors don’t address each other directly. Everything goes “through the chair” (14,445 times). They vote by saying “all those in favor” (17,121 times). And they are, above all, polite: “thank you very much” has been said 27,669 times across 1,417 meetings, roughly 16 times per meeting.

“Point of order” has been invoked 1,943 times, roughly once per meeting. There have been 6,916 recorded votes, 1,044 declared conflicts of interest, and 178 lunch breaks. The formality is deliberate: it’s how a council of 25 members (now 26) manages to work through agendas that can span hundreds of items.

Gut Feeling vs Evidence

Here’s the most uncomfortable finding in the entire dataset. We counted how often councillors use opinion phrases (“I believe,” “I think,” “in my opinion,” “I feel,” “my view”) versus evidence phrases (“the data shows,” “evidence suggests,” “studies show,” “research indicates,” “the report says,” “staff report”). The ratio? 25 to 1. For every time someone in Toronto City Council cites evidence, they invoke personal belief 25 times.

Look at the chart. The opinion line towers over the evidence line so completely that evidence is barely visible. In 2022, councillors said “I believe” or “I think” an average of 100 times per meeting while citing data or reports fewer than 3 times. The ratio hit 34:1 that year, the highest in the dataset. Even in the best year (2024, at 20:1), opinion language still dominates by an overwhelming margin.

This isn’t about whether opinions are invalid. Elected officials are supposed to exercise judgment. But a 25:1 ratio suggests that Toronto’s council makes decisions primarily on vibes, not evidence. When a councillor stands up and says “I believe this development will harm the neighbourhood” instead of “the traffic study shows...”, the quality of the debate suffers. Staff produce hundreds of reports each year. The transcripts suggest councillors rarely cite them.

When Toronto Governs

City Hall has a clear rhythm. Tuesday and Wednesday are the busiest days (295 meetings each), followed closely by Thursday (255) and Monday (248). Friday drops to 174. Saturday meetings? Zero. There is exactly one meeting recorded on a Sunday across the entire decade.

January is the busiest month (147 meetings), driven by budget season. August is effectively dead: just 11 meetings total across all years, when councillors and staff take their summer break. The government of a city of 3 million people largely pauses for one month every year.

The COVID Paradox

COVID didn’t stop Toronto’s council from meeting. It made them meet more. In 2019, there were 85 meetings totaling 44.2 hours. In 2020, there were 173 meetings, but only 28.6 hours. More than double the meetings, in 65% of the time. Virtual meetings were ruthlessly short: the average dropped from 31 minutes to under 10. Council discovered that when you remove the commute, the small talk, and the catering, governance gets faster. Then they went back to normal.

The 2021 rebound is the real story: 136 meetings, 36.1 hours, average of 15.9 minutes. Council was finding a middle ground between the virtual sprint and the in-person marathon. But by 2022, meetings ballooned back to multi-hour affairs. The pandemic briefly proved that Toronto could govern faster. Council chose not to keep the lesson.

The Ford Effect

“Ford” has been said 29,655 times in Toronto city council transcripts, making it the most-mentioned name in the entire dataset. More than “Mayor” (25,097). More than “Tory” (17,590). More than any councillor, any staffer, any other politician. This counts both Rob and Doug Ford, but the sheer volume speaks to how deeply the Ford name is woven into Toronto’s political fabric.

The “Mayor” timeline tells its own story. There’s a dramatic dip in 2018: the year the province cut council from 47 to 25 seats mid-election, and the role of mayor became a different job. Mentions stayed low through COVID, then surged in 2022 as the strong mayor powers debate heated up. The 3,173 mentions in 2022 reflect a council suddenly grappling with a fundamentally changed power structure. By 2024, at 3,100 mentions, it was clear: the mayor’s office had become the center of gravity in a way it hadn’t been since the Rob Ford era.

The 119-Day Gap

In 2018, between July 23 and November 19, Toronto’s city council went 119 days without a single recorded meeting. Nearly four months. The reason? It was an election year, and the province had just thrown municipal governance into chaos by cutting council in half. The longest gap in the dataset is a period where one of North America’s largest cities simply had no public council proceedings.

The pattern is clear: summers create gaps (the top 10 all include July or August), but election years make them worse. The 2018 gap is the outlier: 119 days during a period of genuine constitutional uncertainty about whether council would even have the same number of seats. Note the 2020 gap of 43 days starting March 12, the exact day the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Council went dark for six weeks before figuring out how to meet virtually.

In Their Own Words

Numbers tell you what council talks about. But the transcripts themselves reveal how they talk: the frustration, the scale of what they’re dealing with, and occasionally, the raw honesty that slips through parliamentary procedure.

These aren’t cherry-picked gotchas. They’re representative of what council spends its time on: billion-dollar budgets, decade-long infrastructure fights, jurisdictional battles with the province, and the gap between public demand and political reality. The transcripts are full of councillors who clearly understand the problems. the question the data can’t answer is why the solutions take so long.

The Audit: Is the City Being Run Well?

Let’s do the math. Toronto councillors make roughly $120,000/year. Senior staff attending meetings earn more. A conservative estimate puts the fully-loaded cost of a council meeting at $15,000–20,000 per hour when you include councillors, legal counsel, clerks, and support staff. At 5,216 hours of meetings, that’s somewhere between $78 million and $104 million spent on deliberation over the past decade.

That’s not inherently bad. Democracy takes time. But the question is what Toronto got for those hours.

The housing paradox. Housing mentions went from 1,045 in 2021 to over 11,000 in 2024. “Affordable housing” was said 8,250 times. The alarm is loud and getting louder. But Toronto’s housing starts declined year-over-year while this conversation exploded. Average rent crossed $2,800/month. The shelter system hit 98% capacity. The transcripts capture a council that sounds increasingly panicked but is structurally constrained. Housing policy sits awkwardly between municipal zoning power, provincial legislation, and federal immigration levels. The city controls the least important lever while bearing the most visible consequences.

Transit projects that outlive the politicians who proposed them. SmartTrack: proposed 2014, mentioned 1,239 times, largely absorbed into GO expansion. Scarborough Subway: debated since 2013, mentioned 286 times, still not open. Eglinton Crosstown: promised for 2020, mentioned 186 times, opened years late and over budget. Ontario Line: 911 mentions and counting, with a tentative 2031 opening. Toronto doesn’t build transit. It discusses transit.

The 12-hour meeting problem. 150 meetings ran past 8 hours. The top five all hit the 12-hour mark. When city business routinely requires councillors and staff to work from morning to midnight, something is broken in how agendas are managed. These marathon sessions aren’t a sign of diligence. They’re a sign of a system that can’t prioritize.

The procedural tax. “Point of order” was invoked 1,943 times. “Out of order” was declared 547 times. There were 1,382 recesses. That’s roughly 4 procedural interruptions per meeting, every meeting, for a decade. Democracy requires process, but at some point, process becomes the product. “Thank you very much” was said 27,669 times. It might be the most productive thing council does consistently.

August: the month Toronto stops governing. 11 meetings. Total. Across all years. A city of 3 million people with a housing crisis, a transit crisis, and a budget crisis takes July off and barely shows up in August. Whatever your views on work-life balance, the data shows that Toronto’s government has a month-long gap in its operating rhythm every single year.

Every Word Is Public. Now It’s Searchable.

The full dataset (1,764 meetings, 525,481 transcript segments, 38.3 million words) is available on Hugging Face. Two configs: one row per meeting (with full transcript text) and one row per ~30-second segment (with timestamps for audio alignment).

The transcripts were sourced from tominutes.com, which records and transcribes Toronto’s public council and committee meetings. If you build something with this data (a search tool, a councillor tracker, a voting pattern analyzer) let us know.

Democracy works best when the people watching outnumber the people talking. Right now, the ratio is inverted. Maybe this dataset helps fix that.