The emergency department at UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital on March 26.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Colin Best is the president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, where Brian Rosborough is the executive director.
Ontario’s prosperity is tied to the success of the municipalities that people, businesses and industries call home.
Its economy is the sum of these 444 local economies. So, it stands to reason that Queen’s Park would want municipalities to succeed. The province surely wants them to be financially sustainable and productive, and well equipped to carry the load of growth, climate-change adaptation, public safety and creation of places that develop the next generation of Ontario’s work force.
There is little evidence to suggest that’s the case, however.
The Government of Ontario boasts the lowest per capita spending of any Canadian province or territory. Apparently, it expects municipal governments to make up the difference, solve the opioid crisis and deal with the roughly 1,400 homeless encampments across Ontario.
There are provincial cost-sharing arrangements with municipalities for a range of provincial health and social services. Municipalities pay $4-billion a year in this arrangement, which amounts to a subsidy to the province. That’s $4-billion a year of municipal property taxes not available for police budgets or investment in infrastructure to support growth, as well as funding to prepare for the all-too-apparent effects of climate change. And these cost-sharing arrangements don’t come close to meeting critical health and social-services needs.
Decades of isolated policy decisions made within the Queen’s Park echo chamber have compounded problems. More people are facing income insecurity. Health care and mental health demands are not being met. Help with addiction is hard to get. Affordable housing is desperately needed everywhere.
These systemic problems are dragging our communities down, threatening Ontario’s social and economic prosperity.
Municipal governments know this because they are on the front lines. According to provincial data, they invest more than $60-billion a year into public services. They deliver almost every service that businesses and people rely on, apart from primary health care and education.
Increasingly, they are expected to solve systemic problems that are provincial and national in scope. They should be at the table when Ontario makes decisions about investment and growth. Given their level of contribution, shouldn’t municipalities have a say in whether the province’s approaches and the funding arrangements are working?
Queen’s Park should take a greater interest in the experiences of our police, paramedics and all those who work to help people who need housing. These front-line workers are under immense strain after three decades of provincial underinvestment in primary and mental health care, community housing and the basic social services that help people survive.
Ontario cannot succeed unless municipalities do. To prosper, we need to face challenges and threats together. That means collaborating to ensure that the communities responsible for doing so much of the heavy lifting have the capacity to deliver for Ontario’s future.
Together with municipalities, the province should undertake a social and economic prosperity review. We need a detailed and objective analysis of the fiscal arrangements for services and infrastructure investment to determine what is affordable for both orders of government and for taxpayers.
The current Ontario government did not create these complex problems, but it has the resources and the wherewithal to solve them. It has a willing partner in municipalities in every part of Ontario.