Shortly, there will be a municipal election in Thunder Bay with
a new council selected. It is likely
there will be a major change in composition with quite a few new faces and this
will usher in a period of change though perhaps not as much change as one might
expect. In the end, The City of Thunder
Bay is a corporation and what an election does is essentially select its board
of directors who serve as an executive laying out direction with execution and
implementation being the responsibility of the City Administration. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The City Manager reports to City Council and is responsible
for putting into effect the directives of council within the framework of what
is allowed by the Province of Ontario. More importantly, the City Manager and
Administration possess the information set from which the councillors then make
their decision. As well, given their
role as full time employees rather than part-time representatives, they have the time to deal with the detail of
issues. Inevitably, some councillors
will find the level of information and detail overwhelming. The overwhelming complexity of issues in the past has often
resulted in meetings where councillors on the advice of administration quickly
make decisions on millions of dollars of spending and complicated bylaws with
long-term impact while then spending hours debating relatively minor matters
involving a few thousand dollars.
There are some departing members of the outgoing council
that it will be sad to see go given that among them are the remnants of what
passes for a fiscal conservative in Thunder Bay political life these days. Based on a perusal of the candidate slate
currently up for election, this is likely to be one of the more activist
councils that Thunder Bay has seen in some time and their first test will be
the 2023 budget. A relatively new
council will be heavily dependent on the advice of administration and also
eager to deliver on whatever promises they have made and agendas they campaigned
on, and the result will likely be a heftier tax increase than has occurred over
the last few years.
The Mayor’s position is essentially one of first among
equals despite whatever strong mayor powers are eventually afforded by the
provincial government to Thunder Bay. The
outgoing Mayor was good for Thunder Bay given he was articulate, well informed
and lent a certain dignity and gravitas to the position – though some times while
in the midst of yet another marathon Zoom meeting he seemed increasingly exasperated
and resembled an artist being forced to work on a much smaller canvas. Such a sentiment is understandable, but the Mayor might have been happier by drawing inspiration from others in Thunder Bay and
northern Ontario in a range of positions and occupations who have made a career
of working on a smaller canvas.
In the end, the challenges for the next council are
many. There is a housing and
homelessness crisis in Thunder Bay that parallels that in other cities given
the climb in rents and home prices during the course of the pandemic. There is crime – with 12 murders already in
2022, Thunder Bay is well on the road to regaining its title as Canada’s murder
city in per capita terms. And of course who can forget infrastructure whether
it is roads and sewers or recreational infrastructure given that the Turf
facility has reared its head as an issue in the election with some candidates expressing
support for the concept but not at the original high cost.
Surprisingly, little mention has been made of the other
chaotic infrastructure problem Thunder Bay faced during the pandemic which was
the plague of leaky pipes in homes throughout the city in the wake of the sodium hydroxide water
supply lead mitigation experiment.
Needless to say, the public silence from the outgoing Mayor and council
on this issue - no doubt on the legal advice from City Administration and its
lawyers given potential costs and legal liabilities - has left a bitter taste
for many. So much for a friendly community
oriented city with your elected representatives always ready to lend an ear.
And the biggest issue?
Well elections are in the end obviously no place for serious long term policy discussions
but the fact remains that Thunder Bay’s regional role as a centre for a growing and under counted Indigenous population is the big
one. Increasingly Thunder Bay and its municipal
ratepayers are paying for regional services on a city tax base. The latest example here is in the case of the
Thunder Bay Police Service and the recommended changes that among other things ultimately mean the
Police Service has to take a regional lens to its operations.
A move to a more
regional approach in policing in the end is a continuation of a trend over the
last twenty-five years that can be best described as informal and piecemeal northwestern
Ontario regional government by default - a regional hospital service, a
district social services board, a district emergency service organization, and
regional public utilities such as Synergy North and TBayTel. Indigenous
organizations have also established presence in Thunder Bay and Sioux lookout
providing regional services to their members.
Yet, there was never really any type of democratic regional mandate for
this evolution. True, one can always
blame the province or Ottawa given that much of this is under provincial or federal jurisdiction but
our local municipal leaders to date have ignored the long term picture painted
by this evolution. After all, it is a
complicated and overwhelming set of circumstances.
Of course the trend to more regional services is also a function
of the claim that Thunder Bay has under counted its population and more services
need to be provided to service this under counted population. But how can you
provide more services if you do not know how many people there are? After all,
on the one hand there are claims made by some municipal candidates we are
losing people “daily”
to other cities but at the same time there are apparently tens
of thousands more people here who need services. Which is it? Unfortunately, social surveys based on
self-reporting and life stories however compelling and reflective of reality do
not a rigorous estimate make.
At minimum you would think we could put an estimate together ourselves based
on local and regional electricity use from Synergy, cell phone and phone subscriptions from
TBayTel, patient counts (given they have addresses or OHIP cards) from medical facilities in
the region, and school enrollments from all the public boards. These should be correlated with population
growth and enable an estimate with upper and lower bounds keyed to census
benchmarks. In the absence of this, one ultimately
has to accept the Census results which do say that according to the
2021 census, the number of Indigenous residents of the Thunder Bay Census
Metropolitan Area grew by about 12 per cent between 2016 and 2021, to a total
of 17,000 people.
And so, what
next? Well, one suspects that after a honey moon period of sunny optimism, it will be business as usual for the next council accompanied with a fairly hefty tax increase. All the candidates acknowledge a lot of
issues ranging from roads to crime to homelessness to mental health to opioid addiction. They don’t agree with increasing what
taxpayers pay when it comes to revisiting the Turf facility and want to explore
alternatives like donations and
fundraising but in the end they will solve problems by “taking action” and “working
tirelessly” which usually means a tax increase as a starting point under the
banner of investing in ourselves and then avoiding constituents when they
complain too much.
Nevertheless,
hope springs eternal. Maybe this council
will be different.
