When Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty met with the editorial staff of The Mississauga News during the campaign leading up to the fall 2003 election, he was asked about the inanity of the pooling scheme that the Harris Tories had set up, which siphoned millions and millions of dollars out of Peel and into Toronto.
The theory was that Toronto’s bigger and better social services network served people from Peel and outlying regions, who gravitated there naturally.
While that certainly happened in some cases, handing our tax money to another municipality hardly seemed a reasonable recognition of the problem. Maybe those people would have stayed in Peel to get help if Toronto’s social services network wasn’t so much better-funded than ours.
Not only did pooling perpetuate the discrepancy in the relative strengths of the local social safety nets, but it was blatantly undemocratic. It meant Peel tax money was sent outside our borders to be spent by Toronto politicians. Ones we did not elect.
Mississaugans were, in effect, subsidizing a higher level of service in Toronto than we could provide for ourselves. It never made any sense.
McGuinty didn’t seem to be much concerned about the democratic deficit that day in 2003. Thank goodness he has changed his mind.
Maybe all those discussions with Ottawa about the fiscal imbalance caused him to look in the mirror.
In yesterday’s provincial budget, the Liberals announced that pooling will be slowly phased out over seven years with the end coming in 2013.
Peel Region Chair was a very happy man this morning. A day after pooling ended, he got to inaugurate the (long-overdue) green bin organics program.
At the Torbram Rd. Integrated Waste Facility, Kolb reflected on the decade-long fight to end the pooling scheme. “Ten years,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it.”
It’s not like Peel doesn’t have lots of its own projects on which to spend its money, starting with its public housing stock which is deteriorating and is in need of expensive refurbishing. It will take a one per cent increase in taxes for each of the next seven-eight years to pay for that alone.
While pooling is gone, there won’t be any cheque in the mail from Queen’s Park anytime soon. To wave a red flag about the pooling scheme, Peel has been withholding a portion of its pooling payment in protest for the past couple of years. Commissioner of Finance Dan Labrecque said, “it’s too bad we had to do to do that to get their attention.”
Peel still owes Ontario about $60-$61 million and has budgeted repayment of $59 million this year.
Good for the Liberals for phasing out pooling. Now, while you’re dealing with Harris errors and omissions, how about uploading some of those health and welfare costs?