r/Brampton • u/Apprehensive-Dust608 • 1h ago
Discussion We don't have to wait for October 26. Patrick Brown has already told us he's jacking up our taxes - it's promise number one in his own mailer.
Patrick Brown's "Law & Order" mailer landed in my mailbox this week. Six pages of promises. Promise number one: 700 more uniformed officers over the next four years.
So I did what the mailer doesn't. I priced the promise - using Peel Police's own numbers.
Start with the fair point: the mailer's core claim is true, as far as it goes. Peel has fewer officers per resident than Toronto and the national average, and that's the service's own published figure. Nobody's against closing a real gap.
But check it against the neighbours, because that's where the story changes. At 144 officers per 100,000 residents, Peel is tied with York and Durham and ahead of Halton. Peel is not short of officers. It is short of value. It spends about $470 per resident on policing, the most in the GTA, more than Toronto's $386. Divide the budgets by the badges and Peel spends roughly $280,000 per officer, against about $220,000 in Toronto - 27% more for every officer on the street. That difference is overhead: the structure, the command, the layers between the taxpayer and the officer on the street. There is an efficiency problem here, and it is the first thing a serious mayor would attack. Brown's answer is the opposite: don't fix the cost, just buy more of it. Which is why this is not really about whether the police need funding. It's about who pays for it, and what the man making the promise tells you about your taxes while he makes it.
Here's the record. Peel Police's budget: $423 million in 2019. $837 million in 2026. It has doubled in eight years. In 2025 alone it jumped 23.3% - $144 million in a single year.
Here's how it reaches you. Police are about 19% of your total property tax bill, collected through the Region of Peel. In 2026, police alone accounted for half of the Region's entire tax increase (1.77 of its 3.36 points) - more than every other regional service combined.
And your total tax bill has gone up 21.8% in three years. Brown's word for that is "zero." His zero covers only the city's own slice of your bill - about 40% of it. The rest is where his police budget lives, and he is the one driving it. This is the cost-of-living squeeze nobody at City Hall will name. It's not just groceries and gas. It's a mayor who votes for the biggest increases on your bill, then campaigns on the word zero.
He is not a bystander to any of it. Brown has sat on the Peel Police Service Board since 2018. That board sets the police budget. It also sets the chief's pay. When a motion came to cap the 2025 increase at 18%, every vote for the cap came from Mississauga members. Brown wasn't one of them. Carolyn Parrish quit the board over the 23.3%. Brown stayed, and publicly commended the 2026 budget. The board he sits on also made Chief Duraiappah the highest-paid police chief in Canada - $604,449 in 2025, up from $299,196 in 2020.
Now price the promise. Peel Police's own 2026 budget costs an added staff member at $194,090 a year. Run it: 700 officers is about $136 million a year region-wide by year four, $340 million over the term, 16% more on the police budget.
Now here is the math on what that does to a Brampton tax bill. Peel splits the police bill between Brampton and Mississauga by assessment - Brampton carries about 38%, Mississauga the rest. Brampton's share of this promise alone is about $52 million a year. On your bill, that's roughly +3.1% - about $225 a year on the average Brampton home. Three per cent sounds small. Stack it. Your bill is already up 21.8% in three years; this one promise takes the rise past 25%. And unlike a one-time fee, it never comes off. It's $225 more next year, and the year after, and every year after that.
And that's just the hiring inside this one promise. It doesn't count the three new police facilities the same mailer promises, with the capital bills and the overruns that always follow.
Now zoom out, because the promise sits inside something bigger. Peel Police's own forecast, approved by the board Brown sits on, takes the budget from $837 million today to $1.23 billion by 2029 - up 46% in the next three years. The 700 officers aren't on top of that number. They're inside it. This is the plan. Run Brampton's share of it through the same math and the average home is paying roughly $640 more a year for policing by 2029 than it does today - about 9% more on the total tax bill, from police growth alone. And if the last eight years are any guide, the real number lands higher still. Brown sits on the board that approved this trajectory. He has never been its brake. He is its salesman.
The mailer's other numbers bend the same way. "706 officers hired" is gross hiring - net strength grew by 241 last year, and Brown's own website says 785. His numbers don't agree with each other. The 911 improvement is real, but Peel Police's own figure for 2025 is a 12-second average answer, not the 7 seconds in the mailer - which compared a worst case then to an average now.
None of this is hidden. It's in his mailer and in Peel Police's published budgets. He takes the credit at the photo op. He takes none of the bill. The endorsement on page one calls him "the strongest municipal voice in Canada for front-line policing." It should come with a footnote: the most expensive one - for you.
Patrick Brown has already told you what's coming next year, and the three after that. Another promise he won't price, another budget he won't brake, another tax bill he'll call zero.
Eight years of this: your money, their secrets. A mayor with no integrity who does whatever he wants.
Vote Patrick Brown out on October 26.
