Toronto Transit Alliance: pounding the pavement campaigning for dedicated transit funding

The Toronto Transit Alliance launched the 1% Solution Campaign to gain support for a 1% dedicated sales tax for the Big Move transit plan. From canvassing neighbourhoods,to meeting with influencers, media and politicians we worked to explain how a 1% dedicated sales tax would work.
Our first step was to get the media to use “dedicated transit funding” consistently. Through meetings with reporters, editors and publishers we achieved this by January of 2012.

Along with this we aimed to get polling done to show that the language was embedded and that people were onside with the idea of dedicated transit funding.

We then wrote a motion (Feb.2012) that was read by Councillor Mary Margaret McMahon and passed with 43 votes at city council – to have a report done on possible funding tools for transit. The report came out on April 1 2012 when all the transit campaigns were to launch. We launched our 1% solution campaign on April 1st with our unlockgridlock.ca website, but the other campaigns were not ready.

Our goal was to get a 1% dedicated sales tax for transit expansion supported by Toronto city council and have council indicate their support for the 1% sales tax to the provincial government. From flyers to editorials and transit symposiums we reached out to Toronto and we where rewarded when the 1% dedicated sales tax was left off the list submitted to the Provincial government of transit funding tools the city would NOT support. The 1% sales tax was one of only 2 funding tools to be left off the list of tools council would not support.

Describe the results achieved

The result of the 1% solution campaign was to gain support from city council for a 1% sales tax in order to provide the Provincial government with an option for dedicated transit funding.

What 3 things in your mind makes this project most worthy of recognition

1. It focused people around the idea of dedicated transit funding
2. It built support around a 1% dedicated sales tax for transit.
2. It caused more people to become aware of the importance of paying for the Transit our region needs.

Name of executive or team leader who managed the project     Sarah Thomson

Tell us about the team

The team was made up Sarah Thomson, Sarah Patterson, Leila Heath, Travis Myers, Marin Wallace and 20 other volunteers who helped us canvass.