It’s been a week, has the sticker shock worn off?
The real surprise was not the 10.32 per cent proposed tax levy increase for 2024, the surprise was that so many people were surprised.
All over Ontario for the last several months, municipalities have been sending out warning flares that this year’s budget is going to come with an abnormally high increase. This week, the Region of Waterloo unveiled an 8.3 per cent increase over 2023 and that’s just for the the Region, and their actual was an extra percentage point above what was projected in the summer.
Back here in Guelph, staff didn’t throw around numbers in advance of presenting actual numbers, but they were not subtle about the implications. During one meeting in April about the Strategic Plan, CAO Scott Stewart warned that council was already putting a lot of extra pressure on the 2024-2027 budget at the time.
Here’s the thing though, the pressure started long before April. It started long before the work began on this multiyear budget, or Bill 23, or the motions to proceed with the new main library or the South End Community Centre. We’ve always been heading to this day and now we’re finally here.
You think the library is too much of a drain? We could have built it 20 years ago for a fraction of the price, but that version of the project was cancelled because the council at the time thought it was too much money and they didn’t think libraries would still be a thing two decades later.
For the last 20 years, every realtor selling a house anywhere south of Arkell has been promising that a new rec centre was right around the corner. They weren’t lying, it’s just that at certain points the South End Community Centre was further away than it seemed.
But it’s easy to look at the big ticket items and say. “We can’t afford that”, which is what inevitably makes the staff members who craft the budget turn to the lowest of low hanging fruit like transit. I will have much, much, much more to say about the decision to turn the 10-year transit plan into a 15-year one, but I’ll just say now that this is not the first time the road to budget savings has passed through Guelph Central Station.
It's also safe to say that so much of the decision making that’s gotten us here has been on the margins. For as long as I’ve been covering these things, there’s been this magic number three per cent. No matter the year, no matter the budget, no matter the pressures, the goal was to get to three per cent come hell or high water.
The thinking here was that the annual tax levy increase should be tied to the yearly changes in the consumer price index, which hovered between two and three per cent for over a decade till it shot up to 6.8 per cent in 2022. I understand why the CPI makes sense as a metric, but buying a loaf of bread is not the same thing as buying a building permit.
And yet, inevitably, the tired trope of comparing apples to oranges emerged again this week as one councillor noted that if they were doing their household expenses, they would have to sharpen their pencils and find places to shave. You know, because balancing your chequebook is the same thing as balancing a $500 million corporation.
Our budgeting, for as far back as I can remember, has been based on these limited assumptions: Saving is easy, get to three per cent, and worry about next year next year. The multiyear budget was supposed to cure us of these assumptions, but after three years it hasn’t, and that’s not the end of it.
This is the part where we talk about the provincial government, and their lack of assistance.
In a supreme act of irony driven by ignorance, Premier Doug Ford wailed against the federal government’s efforts to fund affordable housing this week. “You can’t have a federal government going into a certain town or certain city and dumping funding and not even discussing it with the province,” Ford said. “That's unacceptable. We call it jurisdictional creep.”
Ford has not had a problem with “jurisdictional creep” when it comes to his own commitment to the form, and we see that with our budget. From homelessness to mental health and addictions, and covering all the costs of hospital infrastructure, Guelph is a victim of “jurisdictional creep”. So are all of Ontario’s municipalities, yet Ford doesn’t seem to care.
I will say that we share a portion of the blame in Ford’s willingness to turn a blind eye. For the last several years the City of Guelph has shown itself adaptable at covering the shortfalls with things like IMPACT, Welcoming Streets, supportive housing, and more.
Should we have to be doing these things? No, of course not, this is provincial jurisdiction, but it’s creeped down to us and since someone needs to do something, our city hall has taken it upon itself to address the need. As far as Ford and everyone else at Queen’s Park is concerned that’s a problem solved.
But the bigger problem remains. The hope for an affordable tomorrow, at least at the city, is the hope that Queen’s Park might one day decide to be magnanimous and deliver a cheque, but that’s not a solution either. As discussed repeatedly this week, municipalities need a new deal, and coming up with that is the kind of hard work that governments often seem allergic to nowadays.
And that’s why this year’s budget will not be magically made more affordable by cutting the big ticket items. Getting here was a process. We were following a map and then decided that we were smarter than the map and this is where he ended up, sinking in quicksand and wrapped up in thorny vines.
How do we get out? To be determined…
