You move cities and the potholes move with you. New street, same broken curb, same dead streetlight. The only thing that changes is that you no longer know who to tell, or which form, or which inbox to dig up. So you stop telling anyone.
It does not have to work like that. Picture one app on your phone. You snap a photo of a pothole and the report finds the right city, the right department. Toronto today, Halifax next year. The app does not care. Same login, same flow, same speed.
This is not theoretical. Singapore has had it a long time.
OneService is Singapore’s national civic reporting platform. Every resident, every government agency, every type of complaint, one app. A pothole, a noisy neighbour, a damaged playground, a flooded drain. Same flow. Same UI. Same login. The agency on the receiving end is different depending on what you reported, but you, the resident, only ever see one platform.
Canada has thousands of municipalities. Almost every one of them operates an isolated civic complaint system. Phone trees. PDF forms. Websites built in 2008. The lucky cities have 311. The unlucky ones have a general inbox that someone might check on a Tuesday.
If you’re a resident in any Canadian city, you have learned a different complaint process for every municipality you’ve ever lived in or worked in. None of them talk to each other. None of them share data. None of them remember you when you move.
This is not a resource problem. This is an architecture problem.
The gap is the architecture
I started SolveTO in February 2026 to close the gap between “I see a pothole” and “the city knows about it” in Toronto. By the time Mississauga came online, the platform was tracking close to a million pieces of public infrastructure across both cities. Reports were flowing. Toronto residents were filing things they had ignored for years.
In May, I extended the same platform to Mississauga. SolveSAUGA went live on May 27th. Same login. Same flow. Same report history.
The technical work to add Mississauga was small. The strategic work was the opposite. Because what I built was not “a Toronto app.” What I built was never about one city. Adding the next one is a small step, not a build from scratch.
That distinction is the whole thing.
Why no one else has done this in Canada
The civic tech landscape in Canada is full of single city plays:
- Each Canadian city that uses FixMyStreet runs its own isolated instance with its own login
- Tools like SeeClickFix run one city at a time
- City run 311 systems are each siloed
- Provincial civic platforms don’t exist
- A national civic platform doesn’t exist
There is no Canadian equivalent of OneService. Not because Canada lacks money or talent. Because no one has insisted on building one platform that spans municipalities.
I think there are three reasons:
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Civic tech in Canada is vendor driven. Cities buy products that match their procurement structure. Vendors deliver per city. Multi city means multi contract, multi RFP, multi political battle. Nobody wins.
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The funding model for civic tech is project funding. A grant pays for “build a tool for X city.” The grant doesn’t pay for “build a platform that scales to N cities.” So nothing scales.
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Builders default to thinking single city. The pothole in Toronto and the pothole in Calgary are the same problem. The technical work to handle both is a fraction more than handling one. But the imagination needed to see them as one problem is harder than the engineering.
When you’ve spent a year treating civic data as one problem instead of many, the second city is fast. The fifth city is a Tuesday afternoon.
What unlocks when this scales
Picture, for the sake of argument, SolveTO covering Canada’s fifty biggest cities.
What does that resident’s life look like?
The Toronto resident who moves to Calgary doesn’t lose their report history. The Edmonton resident on vacation in Vancouver can report the broken sidewalk they see, even though they don’t live there. The Halifax student moving to Waterloo doesn’t have to learn a new system. The Indigenous resident in Whitehorse who hasn’t had reliable municipal services in years gets the same 30 second flow as someone in downtown Toronto.
What does the city’s life look like?
Every city sees what residents report across its boundary, the moment they report it. The comparison that takes a journalist a FOIA request and three months, which city fixes potholes faster, sits in the open instead.
What does the national civic data landscape look like?
For the first time, we’d have a live record of what is broken across the country, a photo and a location on every report. Provinces see which cities keep failing their residents. Federal infrastructure dollars follow the signal instead of the lobbying.
This is what civic intelligence means at scale.
The Canadian opportunity
The most ambitious civic platforms in the world are operated by governments themselves. Singapore. Estonia. South Korea. They built top down. Their political systems allowed for it. Theirs is a fundamentally different model.
Canada is structurally different. We have a federation of provinces, each with their own municipalities, each with their own procurement, their own legacy systems, their own politics. A top down national platform is not coming here. Our politics will not build it.
But a platform residents use for free, adopted by the institutions that own the infrastructure, can be built one place at a time. Free for the public. Paid for by the cities, and in time by the universities, utilities, and contractors that manage assets of their own. That is the model, and it is what SolveTO is becoming.
The platform absorbs the differences between cities. The resident gets one app. The city gets a tool they didn’t have to build. The country gets, eventually, one civic data layer.
The next 18 months
Mississauga went live this week. The next municipalities I’m planning to test are within the GTA and beyond.
I don’t promise a particular pace. The pace will depend on residents asking their cities and their councillors for it, on local people championing it, BIA managers benefiting from it, and small frictions that I can’t predict.
What I do promise is that the model is right. One platform, one login, one feed, across Canadian cities.
Singapore figured this out more already. The only thing stopping Canada is the decision to build it.
