If the Premier is coming to speak to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), which always holds its annual convention this time of year, you know he’s going to bring some goodies with him.
The press is there in droves to report on any new announcements because there’s not much happening in the dog days of summer.
So, yesterday in Ottawa, it was no surprise when Dalton McGuinty gave municipal leaders a big dose of what they wanted to hear.
The Liberal government is commissioning an 18-month study that will look once again at the thorny issue of what services the cities and towns look after and what services the province subsidizes. The municipalities, especially big ones such as Mississauga and Peel, hope this turns out to be an exercise in “uploading” of costs.
They are still recovering financially from the last service review from the Mike Harris government which downloaded a pile of services and costs from Ontario onto local property taxpayers.
The municipalities want to make this an argument of principle: property taxes are for local services such as building and maintaining roads and parks, hauling away garbage, etc. The larger government responsibilities for social services that benefit everyone, such as health, welfare, child and seniors’ services should be paid for from property taxes, which are based on income and, therefore, ability to pay.
In other words, the little old lady on a fixed income who still lives in a single family house shouldn’t be underwriting welfare costs for the young kid of the wealthy couple next door who refuses to find a job.
The lines of responsibility for service delivery have become so muddied over the years that this argument is tougher to defend, especially with services such as ambulance and housing which obviously have both a local benefit and a greater societal benefit.
At one point this exercise was labelled “disentanglement” and was given the catchy title, “Who Does What?”
One of the major problems with government in this country is that every level wants to have its hand in everything, so no one can figure out exactly who’s responsible when things go wrong.
In its simplest form, the concept of disentanglement is to make one level of government responsible for all aspects of a service, from policy to paying the bills, thus resulting, in theory, in increased efficiency and accountability. The public knows exactly which politicians to throw out on their ears if things don’t work as they should.
Never going to happen. Not only because the entanglement of services is now so ingrained in our system but also because it is so ingrained in our political culture. Elected officials everywhere are conditioned to blame the province/municipalities/school boards/ministry/bureaucrats/city staff/underfunding/Premier/mayor/funding formula/weather for their problems.
If this were a serious exercise, the expert panel reviewing the issue would be reporting before the next provincial election in October next year, not after.
Let’s hope that this review does focus attention on one issue, however, if nothing else — the ludicrous continuation of the so-called pooling of social service costs in the GTA. That sees our property tax money shipped to Toronto so politicians elected by a different set of politicians there can spend it.
In another time and place, that was called taxation without representation and it started the odd revolution.