When Ontario hit pause on property assessments in 2020, it was meant to be a temporary shield against pandemic uncertainty. Six years later, that shield has become a structural distortion, quietly redistributing the tax burden across millions of homeowners and businesses while the province’s political leadership avoids the difficult conversation about turning the system back on.
A Decade of Drift
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) last valued Ontario properties as of January 2016. In the intervening nine years, the province’s real estate landscape has been reshaped by a pandemic boom, a subsequent correction, and profound shifts in how commercial space is used. MPAC data provided to The Globe and Mail shows the average residential property value has surged roughly 91 per cent province-wide since that 2016 baseline. In the Greater Toronto Area, the increase sits at 72 per cent. Commercial properties have fared even worse, with median values climbing an estimated 103 per cent.
Yet every property tax bill issued since 2020 has been calculated on that stale 2016 snapshot. The freeze did not stop municipalities from raising revenue — they simply adjusted tax rates to meet budget requirements. What it did do was sever the link between what a property is worth today and what its owner pays.
“People just don’t know,” says Paul Sullivan, national tax and advocacy leader at Ryan ULC, a British Columbia-based consultancy. “And if they did know, there would be outrage.” Sullivan has launched a campaign demanding the province restart the assessment cycle, arguing the current system is fundamentally unfair.
The Geography of Unfairness
The distortion cuts across neighbourhoods and asset classes in ways that defy simple narratives. In Scarborough, Sullivan’s firm analysed 1,643 detached home sales from last year. They estimate 40 per cent of those owners paid more than $1,000 too much in property taxes because their values rose more slowly than the Toronto average.
The condo market tells a similar story. Across Toronto, Sullivan estimates half of condo owners are overpaying based on 2025 sale prices, a consequence of a market segment that has softened considerably while the assessment clock stayed stopped.
Commercial property presents the starkest disparities. Regional shopping centres, hammered by the rise of e-commerce, are paying taxes on 2016 valuations that bear no resemblance to current reality. Main street retailers in neighbourhoods like Little Italy, Greektown and Cabbagetown face a different but related crisis: their land values have soared due to transit proximity and intensification, but their business revenues have not kept pace.
John Kiru, executive director of the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA), is skeptical of Sullivan’s modelling. He warns that a sudden reassessment could devastate the very main-street businesses that give Toronto its character. “Are we going to shut down a bunch of small businesses in Little Italy, in Greektown, in Cabbagetown, et cetera, if these tax shifts happen?” Kiru asks. He lived through the 1998 transition to current-value assessment, when the Mike Harris government introduced tax caps and clawbacks to cushion the blow for small businesses. He insists any restart must come with equivalent protections.
Meanwhile, the logistics and warehousing sector — beneficiaries of the e-commerce boom — have enjoyed a prolonged tax holiday. Their properties have appreciated dramatically, yet their tax bills remain anchored to 2016.
Political Calculus
The Ford government’s reluctance is hardly mysterious. Premier Doug Ford has built a brand around a simple, powerful claim: he has never raised taxes. Restarting assessments would not raise the total tax take — municipalities set rates to generate the revenue they need — but it would reshuffle the deck. Some ratepayers would see sharp increases. In politics, the losers scream louder than the winners whisper.
Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy told reporters in June he had no “time frame” for restarting reassessments. By late autumn, his language had hardened only slightly: the government was “still reviewing the issue,” citing pandemic recovery and trade uncertainty. “What people want is certainty,” he said.
Critics hear something else. “If the government acknowledges it, then they’ve got to start talking about taxes and at some point, taxes are going to go up on people,” says Stephen Blais, the Ontario Liberal Party’s municipal affairs critic. “And that would be counter to the Premier’s argument that he’s never raised taxes.”
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) has been unequivocal. In a July letter to the Premier, they called for a return to regular reassessments — ideally every two years. Municipalities are the level of government closest to the consequences: they hear from residents who feel the system is rigged, and they manage the appeals process when valuations finally update.
Lessons from History
Ontario has been here before. Before 1998, the former City of Toronto taxed residential properties on 1940 values while other municipalities used different base years. The move to current-value assessment was a necessary correction, but it required legislative scaffolding: phased implementation, tax caps, and clawback mechanisms to prevent sudden shocks.
The system worked, more or less, until 2007. Then, following a scathing Ombudsman’s report condemning MPAC’s processes as secretive and unfair, the Liberal government froze assessments again. They restarted in 2009 with a new four-year phase-in period — the very mechanism that has been frozen since 2020.
Enid Slack, director of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto, argues the province must eventually return to current-value assessment. “People talk about the winners and losers from a reassessment,” she says. “But they fail to remember that there are winners and losers from keeping it where it is.”
The Path Forward
Sullivan proposes a generous phase-in period, perhaps even a 10 per cent cap on year-over-year assessment increases, to smooth the transition. He says he met the Premier at a Progressive Conservative fundraiser in April and was promised a sit-down with Ford and Bethlenfalvy to discuss the issue. That meeting has not materialised.
Other provinces offer a contrast. British Columbia and Alberta reassess annually. Quebec operates on a three-year cycle. Only New Brunswick has joined Ontario in pausing its system — a one-year freeze this year as part of a broader reform.
The longer Ontario waits, the larger the eventual correction. The phase-in mechanism, designed to spread assessment increases over four years, cannot function if the starting line keeps moving further into the past. Every year of delay deepens the inequity and steepens the eventual climb.
“At some point, you have to unwind this,” Sullivan says. “So how long do we treat people unfairly before we get to that point? And you want to talk about political risk? Keep dragging this thing out. Some people will say there’s political risk in doing it. I want to say there’s political risk in not doing it.”
Why it Matters
Ontario’s assessment freeze is not a technical accounting issue — it is a quiet redistribution of wealth that has persisted long after its emergency justification evaporated. By locking valuations to a pre-pandemic world, the province has forced owners of stagnating or declining properties to subsidise those whose assets have surged, while simultaneously denying municipalities the accurate data they need to plan infrastructure and services. The political convenience of avoiding difficult conversations has a compounding cost: every year of delay makes the eventual reckoning more painful, the transition measures more expensive, and the public trust more frayed. A tax system that nobody understands and everyone suspects is rigged cannot sustain legitimacy indefinitely. The question is not whether the freeze will end, but whether the government will manage the thaw or be overwhelmed by it.
