Undoing

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A forced amalgamation in 1998. Turmoil ensues. The newly forged institution fails to deliver savings. Instead, it struggles each year to contain its budget. A supervisor is brought in to take the reins for a while. Meanwhile, a procession of outside experts peer in and write reports. Yet year after year, the problems worsen. The crisis deepens. Costs continue to spiral upward, but facilities and resources shrink. The administrative layers expand grotesquely out of proportion to their basic function, but on the ground and in the community there is only frustration and worry.

Sound familiar?

The province announced this week it had appointed an expert panel to examine the fiasco that has overtaken the Toronto District School Board. The product of a forced marriage of seven school boards under the unimaginatively named legislation The Fewer School Boards Act, the TDSB has never been far from scandal.

It is getting harder, with each passing year, for the Liberal government to continue to paper over the rot and mismanagement of the bloated bureaucracies created by Mike Harris’s Tories nearly 20 years ago.

For the first time, however, the government is considering undoing its mistake—finally asking whether the TDSB is too big to manage effectively. On the ground, the answer is obvious. It has been obvious for a long time. Kathleen Wynne herself was a TDSB trustee in 2002 when a supervisor was appointed to manage the affairs of the board. She knows the decay from the inside. Yet she and her government cling to Harris’s broken and illconceived policies—cobbled together in haste and pushed onto communities with a promise of efficiency but the planning sophistication of a horn trip.

So why does it take so long for a government in a liberal democracy to recognize mistakes—and fix them? There is an ocean of evidence amassed over the past 20 years that make it blindingly clear Harris’s amalgamation scheme failed in every conceivable way. It did not deliver the savings promised. It did not make these public institutions more efficient. It did not tame costs.

It simply fattened the bureaucratic class. Then as the clamour for these costs to be reined in grew louder, these same bureaucrats plundered their own fiefdoms, stealing resources from their own facilities and programs, all to ensure the continuity of their useless jobs.

We may look at the disaster of the TDSB and conclude it’s Toronto’s problem. We may not see it as emblematic of a failed, half-baked ideology. Yet its legacy is all around us—it burdens us still. It will do so for many years.

When the Harris government seized control of school boards, it tore these institutions out of the communities that had funded them. In return, it downloaded a network of roads and bridges onto municipalities—onto property taxpayers— ill-prepared and poorly equipped to manage them.

Now rural communities like Prince Edward County are buckling under the weight of repair and replacement costs. They can neither tax nor borrow enough to fix their roads as fast as they decay.

No discussion of botched amalgamation is complete without considering the plight of Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital. It was amalgamated into QHC in 1998, the same year the TDSB’s forced marriage was annointed. Since then, the hospital corporation’s budget has expanded nearly every year. And nearly every year QHC struggles to contain its costs. Yet PECMH has become steadily smaller—fewer beds, fewer nurses and fewer resources.

Now a new way of funding hospitals reveals that QHC is less efficient than its peers. QHC says this is because it manages a multi-site hospital.

If that is the case, the answer is plain—break up QHC. The goal of thrusting four hospitals together under one corporation was efficiency. It wasn’t achieved. If anything, it has made matters worse. Seventeen years later, QHC’s cost structure places it among the least efficient of its peers. If managing four hospitals makes QHC inefficient, surely the logical response is to break it up.

What is there left? What rational basis is there for continuing this broken and ill-conceived arrangement? Surely this is the last leg propping up this failed scheme.

Like the TDSB, all taxpayers got from the amalgamation was higher costs, bloated administration and poorer service.

When the Wynne government finally unwinds the TDSB, it needs to scan the horizon for other ways to undo the Harris legacy.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca