Does Pickering Already Get Audited? Yes, and That's Exactly Why We Need a Forensic Audit Too.

Since proposing a full forensic audit of City finances, developer deals, and casino revenue as part of my platform, I've heard from a number of residents pushing back with a fair question: doesn't the City already get audited every year?

Yes, and I want to address that directly, because getting this right matters more than winning an argument.

The Annual Audit Is Real

Deloitte LLP is the City of Pickering's external auditor. The City's own Council Highlights confirm Deloitte audited Pickering's 2023 consolidated financial statements and delivered an unmodified audit report. Every year, Deloitte conducts a financial statement audit of the City's consolidated finances.

That audit answers one specific question: do the City's financial statements fairly and accurately represent its financial position, in accordance with Canadian public sector accounting standards? It is real, professional, credible work, and residents should have confidence in it.

Why It's Not the Same Thing I'm Proposing

A financial statement audit is an assurance exercise. It checks, on a sample basis, whether the numbers in the City's books are presented honestly and add up correctly. What it does not do is ask why.

It doesn't examine whether specific developer agreements are structured fairly for taxpayers. It doesn't dig into how casino revenue is allocated. It doesn't ask value-for-money questions about individual spending decisions. And critically, it does not investigate the question residents actually want answered: with all the growth and new housing Pickering has seen, why do property taxes keep climbing instead of that growth paying for itself?

That is what a forensic audit is for, an investigative review, not just an assurance opinion. And having looked closely at the numbers, I can tell you this question isn't hypothetical. There is a real, documented answer, and it's worth every resident understanding it.

What the Records Actually Show

In November 2022, the Province introduced Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act. Among other changes, Bill 23 forced every municipality in Ontario, including Pickering, to phase in development charges gradually over the first five years of any new development charges bylaw. In plain terms: for a period of time, the City was legally prevented from charging developers the full cost of the growth-related infrastructure their projects required.

Pickering's own City Hall objected to this in writing. In a formal comment letter to the Province in November 2022, the City's own senior staff warned that the mandatory phase-in “will result in a significant decrease in DC revenues,” and that factoring in “one other source of financing, the ‘Pickering Taxpayer,’” the City would “probably have to make some difficult decisions regarding property tax affordability.”

Read that again. City Hall's own staff put it in writing: when developer charges get reduced, taxpayers are the backstop.

In 2024, the Province partially reversed course with Bill 185, removing the mandatory phase-in. As of June 2024, Pickering could once again charge full development charges, and a new Development Charges Background Study and bylaw followed in June 2025. So this specific gap was real, it was provincially mandated, and it lasted for roughly two years, not a permanent state of affairs, but a real one, with real consequences for your tax bill during that window.

Two Gaps That Are Still With Us

Even now, two structural gaps remain:

First, land costs. Under the Development Charges Act, land, aside from parkland, isn't automatically an eligible cost that development charges can recover. That means land for growth-driven infrastructure, like a new fire station site, can fall to tax dollars instead of developer contributions.

Second, Community Benefit Charges, the tool municipalities can use to capture value from larger developments, only apply to buildings of five storeys or more with ten or more units, and are capped at four percent of land value. Smaller and mid-rise developments, which still add residents and demand for services, contribute nothing through this tool.

Why This Matters

None of this is an accusation that anyone broke the law. The phase-in was provincial policy, not a Pickering decision. But it is proof that the simple assumption “more growth means more revenue, which should mean stable taxes” does not automatically hold true, and that residents have, at points, been asked to cover gaps that growth alone should have covered.

An annual financial statement audit was never designed to catch this kind of structural, policy-driven gap. It isn't built to ask whether the City's growth is actually paying for itself, whether developer contributions reflect their true share of the cost, or whether reserve funds are able to keep pace with the infrastructure they're meant to fund.

That is exactly the job a forensic audit is built to do. As Mayor, I will commission one within my first 100 days in office, covering City finances, developer agreements, casino revenue, and how tax dollars are actually being spent, so residents get a straight answer instead of an assumption.

This Is Happening During a Real Affordability Crisis

None of this exists in a vacuum. As of August 2026, Canada's inflation rate sits at 3.0%, at the very top of the Bank of Canada's target range, and grocery prices are still rising, even after finally slowing below the headline inflation rate for the first time in over two years. Rent inflation in Ontario is accelerating again. Across Durham Region, food bank visits hit a record high this past year, up 20% in a single year to over 300,000 visits, the worst numbers the region has ever recorded.

Pickering residents are not struggling because they're doing something wrong. They're struggling because the cost of groceries, rent, gas, and heat keeps climbing, while wage growth hasn't kept pace for a lot of households. Property tax increases on top of that don't land in isolation. They land on people who are already stretched thin.

This is exactly why a two-track approach matters. Some of the pressure driving your bills higher — inflation, interest rates, the broader cost of housing — is genuinely provincial and federal territory, and I will keep pushing the Province, alongside other Ontario mayors, to treat affordability as the emergency it actually is. But some of it is squarely municipal: how City Hall spends, who actually pays for growth, and whether residents are being asked to quietly cover gaps that should never have landed on their tax bill in the first place. I'm not waiting for Queen's Park to fix what Pickering can fix on its own, and I won't pretend Pickering alone can fix what genuinely requires provincial action. Both things are true, and residents deserve a Mayor who's honest about which is which.

What I Can Actually Do About This as Mayor

Some of what's driving this gap comes from decisions made at Queen's Park, not City Hall, and I want to be straight with you about that distinction. A Mayor cannot rewrite the Development Charges Act or the Planning Act. But there is real work a Mayor can do within existing authority, and there is a role every Mayor has in pushing the Province to close these gaps.

Within the City's own authority, I will:

• Commission the forensic audit itself, to put an exact number on how much of the 2022 to 2024 phase-in gap, and any land cost gap since, has actually been absorbed by taxpayers, rather than leaving it as an estimate.
• Confirm the City is charging the full, maximum development charges the law currently allows, and report publicly, in plain language, whenever that isn't the case and why.
• Review any development charge exemptions that go beyond what the Province requires, and bring any locally discretionary exemptions back to Council for public debate, rather than letting them continue by default.
• Require transparent, regular public reporting on the Development Charges Reserve Fund, so residents can see, service by service, whether growth-related reserves are keeping pace with growth-related costs, or quietly falling behind.

Where it takes provincial advocacy, I will:

• Push, through the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and directly to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, to expand what development charges are legally allowed to recover, including land costs for growth-related infrastructure.
• Advocate for raising, or removing, the current cap and narrow eligibility rules on Community Benefit Charges, so mid-size developments contribute their fair share too, not just towers of five storeys or more.
• Use the hard numbers from the forensic audit as the evidence base for that advocacy, so Pickering isn't just asking the Province for fairness in the abstract, but showing, in dollars, what the current rules have already cost residents.

I won't tell you I can fix provincial law by myself, because I can't, and any candidate who tells you otherwise isn't being straight with you. What I can do is make sure Pickering uses every tool already available to the fullest, and leads the fight, with real numbers, to get the rest fixed at Queen's Park.

Shaun Rickard

Candidate for Mayor, City of Pickering
shaunrickardformayor.ca