This is a question that this newspaper will pose to the Algoma-Manitoulin candidates seeking election to Queen’s Park in June: “what will your government do to assist small municipalities with the burden of policing costs?” so when they are reading this commentary, this is a heads up.
During the Mike Harris Progressive Conservative mandate, many costs previously borne by the province were downloaded to municipalities via the District Services Boards (DSB) that were created to administer social services. Offsetting revenues, to assist small municipalities like the ones on Manitoulin, were offered through a vehicle called the Community Reinvestment Fund.
Later on, policing costs were also downloaded to the “users,” the citizens who pay taxes in each of Ontario’s municipalities that are served by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) with the idea that this new municipal bill would also be paid directly by taxpayers through a new charge added to their tax bills.
Meanwhile, the Community Reinvestment Fund was renamed the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund (OMPF) by the Liberal government that succeeded the PCs and it has become clear that while downloaded services have grown more costly, the offsetting OMPF revenues have diminished.
In fact, the OMPF was never meant to compensate the costs related to OPP services so these have become a distinct tax burden on their own.
With the new formula for OPP services, and using Manitoulin Island as an example, virtually all municipalities will pay more for the same thing, with the exception of the Northeast Town that the formula happens to favour.
There is a widespread appeal from small municipalities with populations of under 5,000 people that, for them, this burden is practically universally an onerous one and that the province should reassume this particular identifiable cost.
The model for downloading all of the services (ambulance, social housing, Ontario Works/welfare and, of course, OPP policing) is that the user should pay, with increasingly minimal levels of assistance, from senior governments.
With a long and cold winter such as the one we’ve just experienced, many people have scraped by —just— to stay warm in their homes and have had to purchase more fuel oil, propane, cords of wood or kilowatt hours of electrical energy than they had budgeted for.
And then their taxes (or their rents if they’re tenants) go up because of the cost of services over which they have no control.
Suggestions of assistance to small municipalities, and hence taxpayers, to share this burden were conspicuously absent from the recent budget that was the final straw that brought down the minority provincial Liberal government.
But assistance in this way would be a very direct economic stimulator and would certainly be an identifiable infusion of capital into small, rural communities in the sense that it’s money that would be able to be spent at home.
The uploading of these costs is of significant importance to all of us who live in Manitoulin’s municipalities and should become an aspect of this election’s discussion.
