Financial Arson: Tens of Millions Disappear in a Puff of Smugness

As Burlington residents navigate the 5.8% property tax increase finalized in the 2026 budget, an uncomfortable truth is emerging from City Hall. We are a city that chooses to fund courtroom defeats over community foundations.

In the world of municipal politics, there is a dangerous allure to resistance at all costs. It looks good on social media and sounds resolute in a council chamber. But for the taxpayers of Burlington, this litigate first policy has become a multi-million-dollar dead end that is hollowing out our infrastructure reserves and stalling our future.

This would have yielded better results. At least we wouldn't have paid the legal penalties this way.

The futility of the fight against the CN Intermodal Hub was baked into the Canadian Constitution long before the first legal brief was even filed. Under the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity federal undertakings like national railways are largely insulated from provincial and municipal interference. By pursuing this to the Supreme Court of Canada, which predictably refused to even hear the appeal in 2025, City Hall spent $30M fighting a legal principle that has been a cornerstone of Canadian law for over a century. This sad, deluded choice led to a high-priced "protest vote" over a pragmatic seat at the negotiating table. By the time the Supreme Court effectively ended the challenge in 2025 the Halton municipalities had poured roughly $30M into legal fees. After the dust settled it was hit with an additional $2.28M penalty to cover CN’s costs.

We see this pattern again with Millcroft Greens. After spending hundreds of thousands of public and private dollars at the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT), the development was approved anyway. But the fiscal absurdity didn't stop there. In early 2026, it was revealed the city inquired about buying the land for $15M. This was triple its 2020 value. This was a desperate, ineffective way to settle the matter and was undertaken without public consultation. When a legal strategy is so broken that the only remaining move is a $10M overpayment, the strategy has become a liability.

In 2025, Burlington opened the state-of-the-art Skyway Community Centre at a cost of approximately $40 M. The money we litigated away on a single losing case against the federal government represents nearly 80% of a brand-new community center. We spent the equivalent of a generational recreation hub on a stack of useless court filings. The $32.2M lost on the CN and Millcroft could have paid for nearly the entire original 2019 Skyway project out of pocket, without taking on the $20M in new debt they eventually needed to finish the project after they failed to secure additional funding from the federal and provincial governments they had long claimed was coming. The City’s 2020 and 2021 financial plans explicitly relied on a massive influx of cash from the federal and provincial governments that failed to materialize. In July 2021, Burlington applied for $13,019,500 from the federal Green and Inclusive Community Buildings (GICB) program. This was intended to cover over half of what was then a $25M project. The grant was never approved. By March 2022 staff had to admit to the community that no new government funding programs had been offered and the $13M hole remained empty. Because the $13M grant vanished, the City had to approve $20.2M in tax-supported debt to finance the remaining construction. It begs the question: If the city hadn't been fighting the federal and provincial government in court so viciously and prominently, would this funding have been secured?

The 2026 budget for roadways is $51.3M. The legal losses from Milton Hub alone represent 62% of that entire annual budget, which is the single largest slice of our capital investment. Consider that the legal fees alone could have covered the cost of 21 Kilometers of Protected Bike Lanes. At an average cost of $1.5M per km for high-quality, separated infrastructure, we could have built a continuous cycling spine from Aldershot to Burloak Drive and still had roughly $10M left!

Burlington cannot afford to be the most litigious municipality in the GTA if it continues to be the most frequently defeated. Every dollar spent on performative lawsuits where the constitutional or provincial odds are stacked 100-to-1 against us, is a dollar taken from the programs that run this city. Additionally, the ill will garnered by the repeated interjections into projects outside of our jurisdiction only serves to lower the chances of receiving optional funding from these branches of government.

Burlington deserves a city hall that values the tangible assets we can see and use. Parks, paths, and safe roads are the future as opposed to courtroom victories that were never coming in the first place. Moving forward any cost of litigation should be weighed against the benefits we could gain by cooperating with provincial and federal directives. At the end of the day, if we spend $32M of taxpayer's hard-earned money, our residents expect something more than a pat on the back and a hole in their wallet.

Join me in advocating for a more responsible and reasonable city government that prioritizes tangible results for citizens now.