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Echoes
Must we experience every lesson? Must we feel searing pain and lasting scars before we know that some choices can be dangerous? Are there some things we can learn from others? From their experience?
A couple of stories from across the province over the weekend. In Norfolk County last week, the council scrapped a plan to build a regional water plant and a 20-kilometre pipeline to supply water to five communities.
Five years ago, the estimated cost for the new water system was $50 million. The current estimate exceeds $450 million. (Norfolk spent $3 million to learn the price had risen ninefold—and spent half a decade on a dead-end path. An expensive lesson.)
Norfolk council drew a hard line: unless and until the province and federal governments paid two-thirds of the cost, it would not proceed. The municipality would be ‘drowning in debt,’ concluded Norfolk council.
Senior levels of government failed to step up. So, last week, the Norfolk council packed up its regional water plan, put it in a box and placed it on a dark shelf in the basement.
“…in the absence of funding, we have to do something else,” Andrew Grice, Nor folk’s director of public works, told councillors at Tuesday’s meeting in Simcoe, according to a report in the Hamilton Spectator.
Norfolk is home to about 65,000 folks. About half the population is served by the water system. Norfolk council decided it would not—could not—put this burden and risk on a few thousand ratepayers.
Doug Ford behaves as though he thinks municipalities are obstacles to new homebuilding in Ontario. He says it is cities, towns and counties that are thwarting his goal of 1.5 million new homes by 2031. Yet his government is refusing to fund the infrastructure upgrades needed to make it happen—waterworks, roads, schools, longterm healthcare, and so on. (To be clear, previous governments also neglected rural infrastructure in favour of other priorities.) But this is different. Doug Ford is pushing these communities to make terrible decisions with permanent consequences.
Ontario’s Bill 23 and subsequent legislation— including the introduction of strong mayor powers—are blatant attempts to bully municipalities into funding the expensive upgrades and expansion that Doug Ford won’t pay for.
Norfolk refused. Another community has just handed the keys to its township to the province. Others will follow.
The township of Fauquier-Strickland announced last week that it will lay off all municipal staff on August 1. Facing a $2.5 million deficit and a potential 300 per cent tax hike, the council voted to cease operations.
All municipal services will be halted because its “reserve funds are empty and it has no cash to keep operating,” according to a report in TimminsToday.ca, an online newspaper serving the northern Ontario region. The township has asked the province to appoint a supervisor to take over running the township.
Fauquier-Strickland’s financial woes stem from a water treatment plant that soared wildly over budget in 2023.
Water rates in Norfolk County and Fauquier-Strickland township are already among the highest in the province.
Among the reasons people choose to move to rural communities is to escape the high cost of living in the city. Only when they’ve settled in do they discover that their property taxes and water bills are higher than those in the cities they fled.
Ontario communities have muddled along with meagre financial support for their aging infrastructure for two decades. The bill is coming due. Meanwhile, the province has walked away from its responsibility. Instead, it is attempting to force rural communities to fund this work—on the back of a few thousand ratepayers.
Doug Ford is counting on compliant municipalities doing what they are told and absorbing the political fallout. Some councils are starting to push back.
Fauquier-Strickland Mayor Madeleine Tremblay predicts that if her township fails, it will trigger a domino effect “between Kapuskasing and Cochrane”. The impact of falling dominoes will surely be felt much further than that.
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