Environment

Catch Basins Need Cleaning Out: Flooding illustrates the failure to maintain public infrastructure. Required maintenance involves cleaning out every catch basin every year. Where are Toronto’s street sweepers?  Where are Toronto’s vacuum trucks?

Changing Groundwater Conditions in Urban Development: Construction of deep foundations and underground garages affect the level of the water table. Groundwater pressure against structures finds release through cracks and holes, resulting in flooding. 

Reminder: Many buildings in Toronto are built above streams and water courses.  Increasingly deeper and wider building foundations together with the seasonal changes in water table levels and tighter spaces for ground water are certain to cause problems. 

Taller buildings mean deeper foundations pushing ground water to different places.

A major artificial intelligence data centre "gold rush" is underway across the GTA, featuring massive hyperscale facilities in Scarborough, Etobicoke, downtown Toronto, Markham, and Vaughan. These power-dense complexes are driving fierce municipal debate regarding resource strain, environmental footprints, and local costs.

Key Impacts and Concerns:

1. High Electricity Use:  AI training chips use exponentially more power than standard cloud servers, running high-density racks that risk straining local grids. Ontario predicts data centres will drive about 13% of new electricity demand by 2035, raising concerns about household utility bill increases and local grid capacity.

2. Water Use: Millions of gallons of freshwater are consumed daily to cool overheating computer chips, straining local municipal water treatment and supply. These AI data centres also produce chemical-laden wastewater.

3. Community Disruption: Residents near urban and suburban sites have raised alarms over constant low-frequency hums/noise pollution from cooling units, diesel backup generator emissions, and a lack of public consultation.

4. Electronic Waste: Frequent hardware upgrades and short lifespans for specialized AI chips generate millions of tons of toxic e-waste.

Sources:

Toronto Star: Toronto’s AI Data Centre Gold Rush

Global News: Fears are widespread about data centre impacts on Canada’s water, environment: poll

High-Density Residential Development must address:

a) local employment opportunities for residents

• Where will the thousands of additional residents work?

• How will these people get to work?

• Where are the jobs?

• What types of jobs are locally available?

• What are the expected commute times?

• What are the expected household incomes of residents?

b) neighbourhood infrastructure

• Is the municipal hard service capacity adequate (roads, public transit, water supply, sewers)?

• Is payment in lieu of dedicated space for parks, libraries, schools, fire/police, etc preferable and reasonable?

c) neighbourhood retail and health services

• Proximity to grocery stores and other shops as well as access to sufficient and broad retail competition are necessary.

• Proximity to health services of every type and access to multiple providers of each service type are important.

• Is the provincial government building new hospitals in conjunction with the new high-density residential developments? Any hospital expansions? More hospital beds? More doctors?

• Can ambulances meet response time targets?