Mayor Mark Sutcliffe labored out a ‘new deal’ for Ottawa with the province again in March. Heralded as a ‘large win’ on the time, it now seems extra like a child step.
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For the final three weeks, we’ve got been listening to about how the Metropolis of Ottawa is on the precipice of a dire financial crisis. Prepare for many extra of the identical.
As council gears up for its fall session, on the prime of its to-do record will likely be placing parameters round how workers draft the 2025 finances. However earlier than they do this, council is predicted to be briefed on a large variety of advanced fiscal points: from the long-term monetary outlook for transit, to the town’s rivalry that the federal authorities is shortchanging us relating to payment-in-lieu-of-taxes for his or her buildings. All this may increasingly occur as early as next Wednesday’s council meeting.
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These updates will undoubtedly present that we’re in hassle. And count on many requires the province and feds to step up and “pay their justifiable share.”
As certainly they need to. For years, municipally minded organizations, leaders and advocates have been arguing for an up to date blueprint that spells out which stage of presidency does what — and who pays for what.
Contemplate how, for the final quarter-century, Ontario is the one Canadian jurisdiction the place native authorities is liable for managing social companies. Our cities are additionally on faucet to ship and co-fund a bunch of well being companies, regardless of “well being” being a definitive — constitutional, the truth is — provincial duty.
And whereas the province does present funding for these companies, it’s by no means sufficient. In Ottawa’s 2024 budget, for instance, this metropolis’s property taxpayers will likely be paying for native childcare prices to the tune of greater than $19 million. That’s after accounting for all provincial transfers, person charges and different income.
To ship long-term care, the property tax roll is offering $30 million. And for housing, greater than $130 million.
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These are only some of the companies which can be important in serving to make a metropolis a bit extra inclusive, compassionate and livable for all. However they’re being funded by a property tax system created two centuries in the past to pay for roads and pipes (and faculties, on behalf of the province).
And so, mayors battle for extra funding, with various levels of success. Mayor Mark Sutcliffe labored out a “new deal” for Ottawa with the province again in March. Heralded as a “large win” on the time, it now seems extra like a child step.
Which appears to be the best way of those one-off offers. Nobody faults any mayor for accepting no matter funds might come their approach, or for preventing for extra for their very own metropolis. Ought to the province pay for extra of Ottawa’s LRT, the best way it has for Toronto, Mississauga and Hamilton? In fact! However asking for our “justifiable share” from challenge to challenge, challenge to challenge, disaster to disaster, will not be a sustainable approach to finance a contemporary metropolis.
Because the nation’s capital, and the province’s second-largest metropolis, Ottawa needs to be main the cost in advocating for a brand new fiscal deal for all of Canada’s cities. (To that finish, it may need been a greater search for the mayor to not have held his city-in-financial-freefall information convention on the identical day his colleagues from the Ontario Large Metropolis Mayors group made their public plea to the province for a extra strategic strategy to the homelessness disaster.)
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Similtaneously they make the case for a modernized funding mannequin, municipalities want to indicate that they’re doing their half to run their very own retailers responsibly. For Ottawa, which may imply updating our seven-year-old long-term monetary plan for capital tasks, particularly as workers just lately revealed that we’re $3 billion brief for what we’re planning to construct within the subsequent decade. Or higher managing the light-rail file, with way more transparency. And even arising with a accountable succession plan for senior workers: in the midst of a housing disaster, we at the moment are two years with no everlasting head metropolis planner.
Sutcliffe didn’t create Ottawa’s fiscal disaster, however he and his council colleagues didn’t assist. Nor did many earlier councils. For years, politicians authorised finances will increase that have been extra about assembly marketing campaign guarantees than matching the actual wants of this metropolis.
That’s about to alter. Grappling critically with pressing challenges — fiscal, societal, structural — can not be kicked down the street. However Ottawa shouldn’t be going through these issues alone. It’s time to forge an actual partnership amongst cities which can be fed up with the established order that’s lengthy been insufficient and has now change into indefensible.
Joanne Chianello, a senior adviser with StrategyCorp, is an award-winning former journalist who lined Ottawa Metropolis Corridor from 2010 to 2023 for the Ottawa Citizen and CBC Ottawa.
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