Canada’s longest running combination of basic income for politicians experiment and situation comedy continues with the weekly meetings of Thunder Bay City Council as they wrap up their budget reviews and deal with their usual business at hand. For those of us of a certain vintage, the online meetings do look like a continually shifting combination of the Brady Bunch intro and Hollywood Squares and during the long meetings one can draw some amusement from deciding which councillor or administrator is playing the role of Paul Lynde, or perhaps Gladys, Marcia or Peter.
Nevertheless, even the councillors themselves seem to be increasingly exasperated by the meetings with last week seeing one councillor complain out loud about accomplishing nothing after several hours of debate on the presence of hockey nets at city skating surfaces produced no solution. Several weeks ago, the chair of the budget committee’s facial expression was priceless as one councillor for whatever reason went on a bit of a rant that the city budget was so complicated that it made him dizzy. It would appear that fiscal vertigo is one of the job hazards of being a Thunder Bay City Councillor.
And last week’s meeting also dealt with the free transit fare proposal and produced a suggestion that given the cost of implementing a completely free fare system, that perhaps there should be one free day a month. One is surprised that the more progressive minded members of council did not use this opportune juncture to borrow from the collective wisdom of our current Prime Minister and recently departed Governor General to state that we all experience reality differently and that transit patrons should simply decide when boarding the bus if they thought it was a fare free day. In the end, Council simply decided to freeze transit fares saving riders $68,000 as it would appear that the $115,000 cost of one free day a month was better spent on a new Thunder Bay waterfront sign.
There are of course more serious issues to be discussed but councillors in Thunder Bay prefer spending time on these digressions to avoid the more serious business at hand. To use yet another colorful marine metaphor, it would appear they are simply a school of freshwater smelts who rather than swim upstream to perform their reproductive duty as nature and need mandate, prefer to linger in the shallows, dally around the shore and even go in the opposite direction by joining the flow downstream. In the end, they do not accomplish what they should and all they manage is entangling themselves on hockey nets and other debris.
Among the more serious issues are two in particular. First, there is the matter of the 2021 budget which after several review meetings has done little to further reduce the levy. Apparently, the few hundred thousand dollars in savings that have been generated by the ponderous line by line review is seen as sufficient given that the starting levy increase came in at about two percent. Suggestions of making more substantial reductions were rejected by most councillors and the Mayor, because they have apparently already made so many and they have been keeping levy rate increases after assessment growth at an average of 2.39 percent since 2012.
The selective mathematical analysis leaves out the point that the total levy increase since 2012 has actually averaged just over 3 percent annually. Moreover, one wonders how they can continually say they have made reductions when the total tax levy continues to grow faster than the rates of population growth and inflation combined. It remains that the councillors have yet to seriously deal with the spending and staffing reform necessary to reduce the tax levy to more sustainable levels. As stated previously on Northern Economist, given that nearly 60-70 percent of the municipal tax levy is spending on wages, salaries and benefits, there needs to be a policy of reducing the staffing footprint via attrition with reallocation to priority services and functions.
The hard work of making more lasting structural changes in spending, given that Thunder Bay spends substantially more than other municipalities particularly on protection services and administration, is too much for our councillors to handle. Instead, as shown in last week’s meetings, the councillors prefer the parry, thrust, dodge, spin approach to policy debate with several councillors shedding crocodile tears for the taxpayer’s burden and then calling for tax reform at the federal and provincial level to reduce the reliance of municipalities on property taxation. No doubt, they will next send a delegation to Belgium requesting Pfizer speed up vaccine deliveries to Thunder Bay because the High Council of the Lakehead has decreed it. Of course, there is a certain irony in the fact that external powers often respond to our City councillors and administration with the same casual indifference that Thunder Bay ratepayers have come to know.
And speaking of casual indifference when responding to constituents, secondly, there is the perpetually pesky matter of the pinhole leaks in the wake of the addition of sodium hydroxide to the water supply. Thunder Bay City Council and Administration have delivered their reply in court. In response to the lawsuit filed by St. Joseph’s Care Group (SJCG), they simply deny any responsibility for the problem. Indeed, their position is summarized by:
· the city reasonably and in good faith exercised its power resulting from policy decisions concerning the management, maintenance and modification of the water system
· the city denies that its acts or submissions caused or contributed to the presence of pinhole leaks in copper water pipes
· the city lawfully carried on its responsibilities for the general benefit of the community at large
· the city at no time made non-natural use of its water supply or infrastructure
None of this is surprising as the City has basically denied any responsibility all along, nor has it offered any assistance given the hardship thousands of homeowners and institutions have suffered in Thunder Bay. Indeed, the real problem with the pinhole leaks issue is not only whether they followed an approved process but also the City’s reaction of doing absolutely nothing to assist property owners once the problems became apparent.
What is more surprising is the assertion that: “The plaintiff knew that its pipes were old and beyond their reasonable life expectancy, yet they took no steps to replace them, nor did they install water leak detection systems.” What they are essentially saying is that if your house in Thunder Bay is more than 30-40 years old, you should go probably go out and replace all of your piping as preventive maintenance. The building codes in Thunder Bay are so high quality that houses have a forty-year expiry date. That should be an interesting addition to Thunder Bay’s marketing as a destination for prospective businesses and immigrant seeking to come and set up shop in Thunder Bay.
Moreover, while the SJCG is represented by Cheadles LLP of Thunder Bay, the city has used the tax dollars of the affected parties to hire the Toronto Law Firm of Theall Group thereby ensuring the leakage of water pipes is being supported by the leakage of spending power out of the local economy. But then, the hiring of Toronto law firms to deal with local residents whether it is litigation or labour bargaining has become a feature of publicly funded institutions in Thunder Bay. No doubt, councillors will assuage their consciences by intoning the importance of shopping local in Thunder Bay and asking for the rest of us to support local business as we select companies to replace our copper pipes. If that does not stimulate the economy, then having your housing stock expire every forty-years should do the trick in generating new housing construction projects for a non-growing and aging population.
The zaniness continues and we are all paying for it.
