Raise in hand, Shelley Carroll quits City Hall’s World Cup committee

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Toronto is getting less bang for its buck from Shelley Carroll.

The longtime Don Valley councillor is no longer leading the city’s FIFA World Cup subcommittee, as Deputy Mayor Mike Colle was named the new chairman during a brief executive committee meeting on Monday. Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, who was already on the committee, is being elevated to a new role and will vice-chair the board.

Carroll did not attend Monday’s meeting, but a resignation letter was presented to the executive committee.

“We are saddened, but she’s very busy,” Mayor Olivia Chow told the meeting, before thanking Colle and Malik for “stepping up.”

Neither Carroll nor Chow responded to the Toronto Sun’s requests for comment.

In her letter, dated March 28, Carroll cited her work leading the budget committee and Toronto Police Service Board (TPSB), as well as her vaguely defined role as Chow’s “champion” of economic development and culture.

She wrote that it was “in the best interest of both the subcommittee and myself to step away at this time to ensure that I can fully dedicate my efforts to these critical roles.”

At a City Council meeting on the evening of March 27 – the day before her letter was dated – Carroll urged her colleagues to “be brave” and hike her salary and theirs by 24% – and they did.

Carroll told councillors they should “go right on chronically underpaying yourselves,” just at a much higher salary than before – $170,588.60 a year.

During that evening’s debate and in questions to city bureaucrats, councillors called attention to their workload. Not including the World Cup subcommittee, Carroll’s web page with the City of Toronto lists her as serving on nine city committees, including the powerful executive committee, plus Destination Toronto’s board.

Carroll’s work as budget chief appears largely over for 2025, with spending already approved and the budget committee not due to meet again until January 2026. Carroll has said that job isn’t easy: In a 2023 interview with Toronto Life, she said a previous stint on budget saw many councillors “literally unwell by the end of each process, from overwork and lack of rest.”

The strain put her in hospital with a kidney infection, she suggested.

The FIFA subcommittee, meanwhile, has only met three times since July 2024, and the most recent meeting, in March, lasted less than half an hour – including introductions, a land acknowledgment and the city’s African ancestral acknowledgment.

However, work appears to be ramping up, with the subcommittee scheduled to meet in both May and June – the latter of which will take place less than a year before the first game in Toronto on June 12, 2026.

In a post to her website in November 2024, Carroll said the subcommittee’s role is to track “the World Cup work to ensure cost control and financial accountability.”

Carroll agreed to chair the TPSB in January, when her budget committee was in high gear. She was picked to lead the steering of Toronto’s policing strategy over incumbent Ann Morgan, a lawyer.

Carroll had served on the TPSB earlier in her career, but she only returned to it in April 2024. The TPSB chair can be a city councillor but is often not.

“While it is a challenge to have a dual role” as both councillor and board chair, Carroll said at the January meeting, “I think that, right now, we’re at a critical point where we can also use some of the things that I bring with my experience to … align some of our procedures with the way they work in city councils across the province.”

jholmes@postmedia.com