There is something profoundly disturbing about our federal and provincial governments' seeming nonchalance about their growing deficits. One wonders how these officials can have one set of rules for themselves, and another for everyone else.
Hospitals are a good example. Difficult economic times or not, Ontario's hospitals are required by law to balance their budgets. So are school boards. Any who fail to do so will relinquish control to a government overseer, who will do whatever is necessary, be it layoffs or closures.
Municipalities set their own budgets but are perpetually treading a very narrow path. On one side is the need to provide the services that keep a community attractive to investors, and on the other is the need to keep property tax increases as low as possible so as not to discourage said investors in the retail, industrial and residential sectors.
And the senior levels of government are not shy about mandating programs to be administered by municipalities, health units and conservation authorities without providing adequate funding, or arbitrarily cutting funding to established, but still mandated programs.
Another sore point is the hoops municipalities have to jump through to get federal and provincial money. In the past few years some money for municipal infrastructure has been made available. Invariably the application process is complex and the timelines short. Smaller municipalities rarely have the staff in-house to prepare applications with the required engineering and documentation, and must hire consultants. And consultants do not work cheap. An investment of several thousand dollars is substantial to a municipality that may have an overall budget of only a few million dollars, especially when one considers there is no guarantee the money will be forthcoming.
In essence, municipalities are being forced to gamble with ratepayers' money, and compete with each other for those federal and provincial dollars. They are also forced into the uncomfortable position of setting aside a project that needs to be done in favour of one with less urgency, but a greater chance of meeting the criteria.
Enough with the provincial and federal governments doling out money for specific projects and making municipalities jump through hoops to get it. Enough with the competitive process that sees some municipalities get a lot while others get nothing. And most of all, enough with the focus on one-time and short-term funding.
What municipalities – and hospitals, school boards, health units and conservation authorities – need is fair and stable funding. The application-competition-one-time funding process might free federal and provincial governments from longer-term commitments and allow them to respond quickly to changing priorities, but it has created a growing administrative infrastructure at lower levels – an infrastructure we can ill afford.
Nowhere is this more evident than in health care. When hospitals and health units have to come up with two and three budgets based on estimates of what funding the government might provide, and a whole new administrative body known as Local Health Integration Networks is created to... administer, something desperately needs fixing.
Perhaps when all is said and done and the smoke clears, LHINs will ensure stability and viability in our health care system. In the meantime, there seems to be no end to the need for high-priced administrators in health care, while front line staff are losing their jobs. Someone has apparently forgotten that a $350,000-plus per year administrator means nothing to someone whose bedpan needs emptying and whose pain meds need to be administered.