Grey

Local issues. Ontario-wide lessons.

GREY COUNTY

Why Are Grey County Property Taxes Helping Fund Health Care?

Grey County plans to keep placing $200,000 a year into a health-care funding reserve. Council has also directed staff to include a $175,000 request from Saugeen Hospice in future budgets for consideration. There is nothing inherently wrong with either expenditure. A hospice can provide extraordinary value to families. Health facilities are essential community infrastructure. The issue is jurisdiction.

Health care is principally a provincial responsibility. Municipal property taxation was never designed to become a substitute health-care financing system. Yet municipalities across Ontario contribute to hospital capital campaigns, physician recruitment, hospices and other medical services because their residents cannot simply wait for Queen’s Park to solve local gaps. That creates a dangerous fiscal ratchet. A municipality contributes once because there is an urgent need. The contribution becomes expected. Another organization asks. Then another. Eventually property taxpayers are financing services outside the traditional municipal tax base while still paying provincial income and sales taxes intended to support health care.

There may be circumstances where the local economic benefit justifies the contribution. A municipality competing for physicians, for example, may decide recruitment spending is necessary. But those choices should be identified explicitly as non-mandated provincial-gap spending. Residents should see how much the municipality spends annually on health-care responsibilities that would otherwise fall outside its jurisdiction. Then Queen’s Park should see the same total. Grey County’s $200,000 reserve is relatively small beside the provincial health budget. Across hundreds of municipalities, the aggregate number may not be. When municipalities repeatedly fill provincial funding gaps, at what point does temporary help become permanent downloading?

300 DEEPLY AFFORDABLE HOMES OVER 10 YEARS. IS THAT ENOUGH?

Grey County’s new housing strategy targets more than 300 deeply affordable homes and 50 supportive or transitional homes over ten years.

But approximately 1,500 eligible households are already waiting for social/community housing.

That’s the number residents should keep beside the announcement.

Building 300 homes would be a significant achievement. But the proper measure isn’t simply homes built.

It is:

HOUSING NEED – HOUSING CREATED = HOUSING STILL NEEDED.

Should every municipality be required to publish that number?