Toronto property assessments are shielded from public scrutiny. This is how we discovered many of us were over-taxed

In cities across the United States, property assessment and sale data is readily available to the public. In Ontario, it’s fiercely protected.

The Star used publicly accessible computer terminals at Toronto City Hall that allow residents to look up assessment records, but only one address at a time. Over the course of a year, we built a data set of roughly 20,000 residential properties.