The city of my birth is in rough shape. I’m in downtown Ottawa this week, participating in the annual conference for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, and it bears all the familiar signs of a city struggling to deal with a surge in homelessness and drug use as well as the post-COVID shift in work patterns — in this case, leaving plenty of boarded-up shops in the city’s core.
It hits different when the streets and spaces you remember from your childhood are so visibly distressed, but Ottawa isn’t particularly distinct from other Ontario cities. These problems are afflicting cities and towns all over the province: north and south, urban and rural, big and small. Before this year’s AMO conference, the province’s big-city mayors pleading with the government to create a single decision-maker in cabinet armed with a sufficient budget to help municipalities handle homelessness and addiction.
This is all just the most acute symptom of a chronic condition for Ontario’s municipalities. Since at least the Common Sense Revolution of 1995, Queen’s Park has asked municipalities to take on jobs they’re not equipped for — while declining to either equip them or allow them to equip themselves.
Outgoing AMO President Colin Best gave an uncharacteristically fiery speech to delegates on Monday. He called out the province for not moving forward with what the organization calls a “social and economic prosperity review” — a major rethinking of what services municipalities are obligated to provide, and what means they have to do so. Best noted that the opposition parties at Queen’s Park have all endorsed the review.
“They know what we all know, and they know what the current government very well knows,” Best said. “They know that the current arrangements are undermining the prosperity of your communities. They know that we are on an unstainable path to decline if changes are not forthcoming.”
Unlike the other orders of government, municipalities have duties they literally can’t avoid. As one mayor speaking to TVO Today put it earlier this week: in the absence of sufficient social services, the problems facing towns and cities tend to result in calls to either police or ambulance — “and if you call for an ambulance, I can’t not send it.”
Property taxes make up the bulk of municipal revenue and have the virtue of being relatively stable. But the need for social services is anything but.
NDP leader Marit Stiles and Green Party leader Mike Schreiner made concrete commitments to AMO delegates. If they’re in a position to do so after the next election, both leaders would substantially upload costly matters to provincial responsibility and restore cost-sharing for transit funding
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie also endorsed a new deal for cities but did not commit her party to specific policy details. For Crombie, the solution (or solutions) would come out of a consultation process. “I want to have that conversation … I don’t want to impose, top-down, on small towns and communities. I want to give them an opportunity to have their voices heard,” Crombie said. “Whether it’s a land-transfer tax, which we’re not allowed to do today, a vehicle-registration tax, whether it’s 1 per cent of the GST — there’s a lot of tools that could be selected.”
If the Ford government is being moved by either the urgent pleas of municipal leaders or the promises being made by opposition leaders, it isn’t showing it. The premier’s big announcement for the AMO delegates this week was… a website. Municipalities with large, shovel-ready sites for industrial investments are being invited to register their lands with a provincial website to woo big piles of money.
(If only a provincially minded journalist had recently written something explaining the government’s particular fixation with shovel-ready industrial lands.)
To say that Ford’s speech landed with a thud among AMO delegates would be kind. As local officials streamed out, more than one said to TVO Today something like: “That was it?”
What local leaders wanted to hear was no mystery. Even if the government wasn’t going to comprehensively give in to municipal demands, leaders hoped to hear something, anything, to give them some hope for the next budget cycle.
The AMO conference continues until Wednesday, and the government will make some news. Health Minister Sylvia Jones will announce major changes to drug policy in the province, effectively closing 10 of the province’s 17 supervised consumption sites early next year and emphasizing treatment over harm reduction. Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma and Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra are also scheduled to speak. And, it’s important to say, the real work of the conference arguably isn’t the speeches made from the main stage — it’s the hundreds of closed-door meetings that local officials have with ministers and government staff.
Municipalities aren’t a monolith, and many mayors and councillors will welcome changes to drug policy, or otherwise return to their cities and towns saying they had a productive time at AMO. But the problems that are obvious on the streets of Ottawa, and on streets in towns and cities around the province, need a change in policy commensurate with their urgency and severity. Nothing likely to come from the government this week meets that standard.
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