Six weeks into building SolveTO, someone mentioned Toronto’s voting records were on open data. I went looking.
Everything was there. Meeting minutes. Motion text. Vote tallies, councillor by councillor, going back years. All public. All free. Buried in PDFs written for parliamentary procedure, not for a resident trying to understand what happened last Tuesday.
That’s where this started.
What’s actually on toronto.ca
The official records are dense. Hundreds of pages. Agenda items numbered EX29.4. Language that assumes you’ve read Robert’s Rules of Order. No plain-language summary. No visual breakdown of who voted what. No way to filter by topic and see every time council discussed potholes, or transit, or parks.
There’s data there. There’s no civic intelligence.
What changed
SolveTO now has a council page. 250 meetings. 1,828 motions. 40,317 votes sourced from Toronto Open Data — searchable, readable, and connected to the councillor who cast it.
Each motion gets a plain-language explanation of what it actually does. A visual bar showing yes versus no across all 24 councillors. Names, results, passed or defeated. Tags by topic — #potholes, #budget, #transit, #roads, #parks — so you can filter to what matters to you and see the full history of how council voted on it.
Every councillor now has a voting record page. Every ward page shows how its councillor voted. You can look up any councillor and see motions they moved and votes they cast — sourced from Toronto Open Data, synced daily.
There’s also a leaderboard of top motion movers: councillors ranked by how many motions they’ve introduced in the current term. Who’s active. What they’re pushing. What happened to those ideas.
If you want to go deeper on any motion, there’s a direct link to the official toronto.ca record. SolveTO gives you the entry point. You decide how far in you go.
The vote that made this feel necessary
At the March 26 City Council meeting, council voted to commission a study on building a public interactive map showing pothole reports, repair status, and timelines. Also, council approved studying AI cameras on city vehicles to automatically detect potholes, plus funding for new asphalt research. Report due to the Infrastructure and Environment Committee Q3 2027.
SolveTO launched a solution in February. One map with AI detection. Across all 25 wards.
The council page now shows editorial context on motions like this — where the city is commissioning a study to build something that already exists. Not to be confrontational. Because residents deserve to know that gap exists.
Why civic literacy matters
Most residents don’t follow council meetings. Not because they don’t care, because the information is genuinely hard to consume. The sessions are long. The documents are procedural. The gap between “this vote happened” and “here’s what it means for your street” is enormous.
Civic literacy closes that gap. When you know your ward councillor voted against a motion to investigate why Toronto roads deteriorate so fast, a motion that failed 9-13, you go to the next community meeting with a specific question. You hold a specific person accountable for a specific decision.
That’s not politics. That’s just knowing what happened and who decided it.
SolveTO started as a reporting tool. But the goal was always bigger: residents informed enough to engage, not just frustrated enough to complain.
The council page is the next piece of that. The bigger question — why Canada is so far behind countries like Denmark and Finland on civic technology, and what it would take to close that gap — is something I wrote about separately: Canada is #47. The gap is not resources.
A note on the data. Voting records come from the City of Toronto Open Data portal, synced daily. Not everything that happens at a council meeting is published as downloadable open data — some records are readable on the city’s website but can’t be extracted programmatically. What SolveTO shows is what’s accessible. Every page links directly to the official source on toronto.ca so you can always go deeper.
