The Federal election is over, now back to Ontario

Jeff Green | Oct 25, 2019

In a big way, the Ontario government’s decision to close down the legislature and refrain from making any major public announcements for almost 4 months in the runup to the Federal election, amounted to the end of the beginning of Doug Ford’s government.

The strategy taken by the Conservative Party of Canada to “hide Doug Ford in a witness protection program” in the words of former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, did not lead to a Conservative breakthrough in the Province. In fact, while the Liberal vote dropped by 3.4% in Ontario (from 44.8% in 2015 to 41.4% in 2019) the Conservative vote dropped as well (from 35% to 33.2%). The NDP vote was stable, the Green vote more than doubled, and the “other vote” including the Peoples Party, jumped from 0.2% to 2.4%

The decrease in the popular vote for the Liberal Party did not impact the seat count in any meaningful way, however. The Liberals won 79 of the 80 Ontario seats that they held in 2015, which was unfortunate for Mike Bossio since the only loss was his seat in Hastings, Lennox and Addington, a seat that he won by only a few votes in 2015. The Conservatives gained 3 seats and the NDP lost 2.

The fact that the Liberals held on to so much of their support in Ontario when they lost ground just about everywhere else in the country, is sobering for the Doug Ford government. Ford has been calling the Justin Trudeau carbon tax a job killer in Ontario, and attacking just about every other federal Liberal economic policy as well, so the Ontario voters’ collective decision to support the Trudeau government once again can be taken as a rejection of that message.

We should be hearing less about Justin Trudeau from Doug Ford over the next year or so as a result of this election. The Ontario government will turn its attention to restructuring how government services are delivered in Ontario that they initiated last spring. Presumably there has been a lot of planning going on behind the scenes with a view towards delivering the changes to the way Public Health, Paramedic, Childcare and other services are funded and delivered in the province.

The government claims that the services we rely on, can be delivered for less money by centralizing administration and getting rid of unnecessary frills that have crept in over the years. History shows that while restructuring and amalgamating service providers may lead to improvements in the medium term, the promise of cost savings does not usually come about, so we should all be wary that cuts in essential services may be the result of all these changes.

The municipal amalgamation of 1998 is a good example of what tends to happen. The only cost savings that resulted from the 1998 municipal amalgamation were a cut in the number of politicians, the cheapest part of the system. The staff complement of North Frontenac in 2019 is well above the combined number that worked for Barrie, Clarendon and Miller and Palmerston Canonto Townships in 1997, and the same is the case elsewhere in Frontenac County and Ontario as a whole.

That being said, it is hard to imagine that as municipal ratepayers we would be well served by remaining in townships with populations of under 500 people in 2019.

We don’t yet know whether the Ford government, as they have hinted at since early on in their mandate, will force another round of municipal amalgamation on rural Ontario. They are not a very popular government and they will be depending on support in rural Ontario when the next election rolls around so they may not want to tackle something that might be unpopular.

But most of the institutions and services that are either administered and/or partly funded by municipal councils such as Frontenac County (public health, paramedic services, long term care, child care) are facing cuts and/or restructuring into much larger bodies. Yet, Frontenac County Council and its member municipal councils have not even engaged in preliminary conversation between themselves about how they could merge their own operations in order to create a stronger, more efficient, municipality.

When the Ontario government delivers their fall financial statement in a month or so, or their 2020 budget,  municipal restructuring could very well be included, and if Frontenac County municipalities have not thought at all about how they can put a proposal together to retain local governance, they may wonder why they wasted 2019 burying their heads in the sand.