This morning I spent eight minutes on Newstalk 1010 with John Tory, who was mayor of this city from 2014 to 2023 and now covers municipal affairs for the station. I went in ready to explain the problem. I did not need to. He opened the segment by explaining it himself, and he did it more plainly than I manage after five months of trying.
Here is what he said, before I had said anything at all:
“The one thing that hasn’t been addressed, and we want to talk to him about this, is that you can’t track your complaint. There just isn’t the technology at the moment that’s been installed and put into place by the city to allow you to figure out the outcome of your complaint.”
That is a former mayor, on the radio, describing the exact gap the Auditor General named in 2011 and the city’s own staff report named again last August. He was not being critical of 311, and neither am I. A minute earlier he had said the service amazed him with the breadth and number of calls it handles, and that it handles them satisfactorily in most cases. The people answering the phones are not the problem. The missing piece is the part where somebody comes back and tells you what happened, which is the silence I keep writing about.
The correction I owe him
He was generous with me in a way I need to correct, because getting the record right is the entire point of what I build.
He credited me with the ability to attach photos to a 311 request, and asked whether that was my work. I said yes. That was wrong, and I should have caught it in the moment.
The City of Toronto built that. It launched with the 311 mobile app in January 2022, announced by Tory himself while he was mayor, alongside a rebuilt 311 web experience the previous November. It was the city’s own team, years before I wrote a line of this.
Somebody who spends his days arguing that residents deserve an accurate record should not accept credit for someone else’s work, however kindly it is offered.
But a photo is not what I built, and the difference is the whole product
Here is where I should have been clearer on air, because the distinction matters.
The city’s app lets you attach a picture to a form. You still describe the problem. You still choose the category. You still work out which division owns it. The photo travels with your words.
What I built does not ask you to write anything.
You take a picture. The system reads the photo, works out what the problem is, and drafts the formal report itself, in the language the city uses, at the level of detail a division needs to act. Then it attaches what it knows about the place: the exact location, the ward, the councillor, and the public infrastructure sitting around that spot, drawn from the city’s own open data. Over a million pieces of public infrastructure are mapped on the platform, which means a report about a flooded corner can arrive already knowing what drains are near that corner.
The resident writes nothing. The report that lands at 311 and at the ward councillor is more complete than the one most people have the patience to type, and it gets there in about thirty seconds. That is why the whole thing starts with a photo.
Same word, photo, on both sides. Entirely different job.
Closing the loop
Then the report stays on one public page, carrying the city’s own reference number so nobody has to chase it. And when the city marks the work complete, that page says so, checked against the city’s own records rather than taken on faith.
That last part is closing the loop, and it is the thing Tory said the city does not yet have the technology to do. It went live in Toronto this month. It is also why I care so much about the difference between a status and a fact, which is a thing I have written about at length: “complete” is the city’s word, and the resident gets to say whether it is true.
The city’s own plan for this is real, funded, and named. It is called Closing the Loop, and I wrote about it when the staff report landed. Its next phase is scheduled for this quarter and the portal work runs into 2027. I am not claiming to have done the city’s job for it. I built the resident-facing piece and turned it on while the larger work carries on.
The part he got exactly right
Then he asked the question I did not have a clean answer for. If this is so obviously useful, who is against it?
“It should reduce calls to the call center. It should reduce calls to the counsellor’s offices. If you can go online and look and see the outcome of your own request for service yourself, it would just make citizens more satisfied. So who is it that has a problem with this?”
I said I did not think anyone was against it, and that what I keep running into is that everything on this platform is public, and public means accountable, which is not a comfortable thing for every organisation to take on. And that new things take time, and somebody has to be willing to go first.
He did not disagree, and he did not leave it there. He pointed out that call centres running on phone and email are expensive to operate, that letting people track their own request would save money and be more efficient, and that satisfaction would go up. He was making the operational case while I was still talking about friction. Then he closed the segment like this:
“I hope we can make more progress. We’re trying to shine a light on this so we can make more progress at getting this implemented.”
What I want to happen next
I should be plain about this, because a radio segment is not a business plan.
The platform is free for residents and it stays that way. Nobody should ever pay to tell their city something is broken. That is not a promotional offer, it is the condition that makes the whole thing work: the moment reporting costs something, the people whose streets need it most stop reporting.
The cities are the other side of that. What I want is for Toronto, and for the other six cities already running on it, to adopt this properly, integrate it with the systems they already own, and use it to serve their residents. That is the business, and it is deliberately built that way, so the tool can stay free for the person with the pothole. The same is true for the businesses and property owners who need to understand what is happening on the streets around them.
So there is something to adopt, and I would like the city to adopt it. What there is not is a reason to wait. Residents can use it today, the reports arrive at the city through the channel it already runs, and the answer comes back to the person who asked.
Since February 17, nearly a thousand reports have gone through the platform, it runs in seven Ontario cities, and in Toronto the loop now closes. All of that was true yesterday.
What changed this morning is that the argument is no longer only mine. It is a lot harder to describe this as a nice idea from a developer when the person describing the gap ran the place.
