In July 2018, Toronto city council asked something every resident wonders sooner or later. When a problem gets reported, how long until it’s fixed? The pothole filled, the dumped mattress gone, the broken sign back up, by issue type, in every part of the city. It’s a good question, and it’s in the council record, motion MM44.17. You can read it yourself.
The answer that came back in April 2019 measured what was measurable at the time. 311 answered 75 percent of calls within 75 seconds that year, which is a real achievement at over a million calls. The fix question turned out to be harder, and it stayed open.
Seven years later, the city said so itself, and I give them credit for the honesty. A staff report from November 2025 puts it plainly: 311 data “does not capture where service delivery was completed as planned or is deemed satisfactory by the public.” That’s not a scandal. That’s a hard problem, stated clearly. The system that takes your report was never built to follow it home.
And here’s the part that gets lost. The fixes happen anyway. I watch city crews close things out every single week. The work is real. What was missing was the part that tells you about it, and that turned out to be the half I could build.
Every report through solvecanada.ca gets followed from the moment it’s sent to 311 and your councillor, through the city’s acknowledgment, to the day the fix is confirmed on the street. We close the loop. That’s the whole product in four words.
So this week, the first edition of the Ward Report goes out. One ward, one week, in plain language. What your neighbours reported, what crews fixed and how fast, one repair traced start to finish, the streets that come up most. Issue 1 covers Spadina-Fort York, and it caught a lively week, 5 problems reported and 4 verified fixes landing in the same seven days. Since February that ward has reported 227 problems, 48 are confirmed fixed, and the median from report to confirmed fix is 19 days. Put our numbers beside the city’s own 14,761 requests from that ward last year and you can see something I find kind of beautiful. Your ward has a pulse. Now you get to watch it.
The edition is free and it travels by email; the signup lives at solvecanada.ca/ward-editions. A new ward gets its issue every week, and each issue will grow as the data does.
Council asked the right question in 2018. It finally has an answer, one ward at a time. Finally, we are closing the loop.
