This coming week, members of municipal councils from around Ontario will meet each other, as well as provincial government staff and cabinet ministers, at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s annual conference. Oh, to be a fly on those walls …
This meeting comes at a time when housing continues to be elusive for so many in Guelph and other places, housing starts are lagging if not anemic, cities are begging for help with addiction and mental health services, the healthcare system is teetering on the edge, need outweighs supply in childcare, regional transit outside the GTA has some huge gaps and the reticence to take meaningful action on climate change is having real impacts on infrastructure.
And yet, despite all this, the provincial government seems uninterested in meaningful engagement on the issues. Fiddling with DCs and planning rules has done nothing to accelerate housing, and as for healthcare, Premier Doug Ford stepped in it on Tuesday by cracking wise and suggesting that the facilities at a new animal hospital can handle the overflow of Ontarians needing CT and MRI scans. Liberal MPP Adil Shamji called it Ford’s “'let them eat cake' moment," and he’s not wrong.
But cake is for parties, and it seems like the party never stops in the government benches. As our crises metastasize into a cancerous erosion of public trust, Ford and the provincial government have idled away their summer on trivia like early elections and putting more beer and alcohol into corner stores. Seriously, there was a cabinet minister in Guelph last week announcing new money for fruit displays in grocery stores.
Now I do understand why the government is taking it easy. Nothing they’ve done has worked, and that’s to say nothing of the stuff that they tried to do and then had to undo either because it was half-thought out, rejected by the people en masse, or might have crossed the line into illegality and corruption. What is there left to do when cutting red tape and trying to sell big swaths of environmentally sensitive land didn’t work?
What’s left is the reality that everyone knows but is afraid to admit, and even more afraid to do anything about because it’s the system that’s broken. I find it hard to believe that if we were building a system for the housing and the care of Ontarians from scratch then this is what it would look like. So, what would something different look like?
Before diving into that, a caveat: I’m not, as the saying goes, the sharpest tool in the shed. These ideas may have unintended consequences I’m not seeing, but since there’s no such thing as a bad idea in a brainstorm, I’m just going to throw it out there, as it were.
First, the housing market it not going to solve our problems. Forget it! We don’t just need affordable housing because 80 per cent of unaffordable is still unaffordable, we need real obtainable housing. We need a lot of it. No private developer is going to purposely take a write down on a housing project no matter how many incentives you offer them, so let’s stop putting the blame on red tape.
And yes, the federal and provincial governments will have to pony up. They’re going to have to pony up a lot. Unless, or course, they want to re-write the way governments are funded in this country because the City of Guelph is not going to build the 7,000-some attainable housing units it needs by funding them through the collection of property taxes.
Speaking of funding, we need to look at the greater issues of affordability. Even putting aside the issue of Universal Basic Income, which should definitely be a consideration, we need to understand that there’s a yawning difference in most places in Ontario between the minimum wage, and a living wage. The difference in Guelph is about $5/hr.
But more cavernous than the difference between minimum wage and living wage is the difference between the amount of money that people on social assistance receive and a living wage. For people receiving Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program, they make about $5 an hour. If you can’t make ends meet making $16.55 per hour, how the hell are you supposed to do it on $5 per hour?
It's worth noting that Ontario is increasing the minimum wage to $17.20 this October, but it’s still not $20.90, which is the living wage in Guelph and area. Also, and I feel compelled to add this in advance of Labour Day, a salary should be about the quantity of work, not just the quality. If you work 40 hours stocking shelves or making burgers, why do we consider that lesser work and why do we expect the people doing it to wallow in poverty?
Healthcare is trickier, but I think fixing it means that looking for solutions from the emergency room out is the wrong end of the problem to start from. The ER is a lagging indicator, it’s where you go when all other access points into the healthcare system have failed. How many emergencies could be resolved before they get that far if everyone in Ontario had a family doctor and got a check-up at least once per year?
That’s why the provincial government’s response to the healthcare crisis by giving more power to pharmacies is also doomed to fail. Pharmacies are also a lagging indicator because you’re seeking treatment after you’re already sick. And anyone that’s waited at the pharmacy for 20 minutes as they find the prescription refill you called in three days earlier, knows that pharmacy care is not the answer Doug Ford wants it to be.
Finally, government needs to decide if they’re going to fund things or not. We have too many pilot programs and too many non-profits chasing new funding streams that eats up precious time on administration that could be spent on service delivery. The temporary nature of these things also means that a new government can take away funding and opportunities at an ideological whim.
Hopefully, at AMO this week, there’s a mutual recognition around the failures of the system and not just more blame. If we can agree that the system has failed us perhaps then we can work together to build a better system. That may be a pipe dream, but here, at the end of all excuses, it might be the only move we have left.
