The Next Council: The Challenges for Thunder Bay

 

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.

 

 

Ontario's Partial Post-Pandemic Employment Rebound

 

Like just about everywhere else in the world, Ontario was hit hard by the job losses that resulted from the assorted lock-downs and coronavirus containment strategies of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Figure 1 presents seasonally adjusted monthly employment data from Statistics Canada for Ontario from 2006 to the present.  From February 2020 to June 2020, Ontario lost 990,000 jobs or 13.2 percent of its employment. These losses, however, were not uniform in size across the major urban centers of the province.  

 

 

 

Figure 2 plots the ranked employment losses from the start of the pandemic in February when the monthly employment losses began to June 2020 when the rebound begins and going  from worst to best performers.  Hardest hit with a 25 percent drop in employment was Belleville, followed by Windsor at 18 percent and then Thunder Bay at 16 percent. The three lightest hit cities were Ottawa with a 10 percent drop, Brantford at 7 percent and Guelph at just below 7 percent.  

 

 

 

With the exception of Barrie, all of these cities have managed to bounce back since June as Figure 3 illustrates.  The largest rebound as was the largest drop happened in Belleville.  Belleville saw employment rise 25 percent and was followed by London at 16 percent and Kingston at 15 percent.  The smallest rebounds aside from Barrie which appears to have continued to shrink were Guelph at 6 percent, Sudbury at 5 percent and St. Catharines-Niagara at 4.5 percent.  

 

 

 

Despite the rebound, only two of these urban areas have managed to recover enough employment to be at more employment than the start of the pandemic drop in February – Kingston and London – though not by much.  Others still have a gap and it varies substantially.  Ontario as a whole is currently at about 96 percent of its February 2020 level of employment. Figure 4 ranks the cities by their employment in February 2021 as a percentage share of their February 2020 employment.  Thunder Bay, Windsor, Sudbury, St. Catharines-Niagara and Barrie have recovered the least.  Thunder Bay is only at 93 percent of its pre pandemic level of employment followed by Windsor at 92 percent, Sudbury at 91 percent, St. Catharines at 88 percent and Barrie at 84 percent.  On the other hand, after Kingston and London, Brantford and Guelph are at just over 99 percent of pre-pandemic employment.  

 

 

 

Overall, Ontario has seen a remarkable 12 months with massive employment losses and a rather large rebound, but which only puts it back at about 2018 levels in terms of employment.  There is still  a lot of recovery to go.

Ontario's Covid 19 Progress to Date: Not Quite There Yet

As of May 16th, 2020 Ontario is reporting 22,313 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 1,858 deaths.  The good news is that 75 percent of cases are resolved and the active number of cases is trending down.  There have been some data glitches in reporting the last few days and while the number of new cases is trending down, it remains that the number of new cases is still what I would term a smouldering burn with the potential for re-ignition.  This is of course a concern given that Ontario is beginning to resume activity with an acceleration of openings on Tuesday.

To be fair, this is a disease whose transmission can be prevented by avoiding crowds and long-term presence in confined spaces, spending more time in outdoor well ventilated areas, practicing social distancing and practicing good hand hygiene. At the same time, this requires a fair amount of self-discipline and given that our daily case numbers are still bouncing between 300 and 400 for a week now, it means a chunk of the population still believes the rules do not apply to them and do not understand the concept of negative externalities.  These are probably the same types of people who let their barking dogs out in the middle of the night or throw cigarette butts and fast food wrappers out the window as they drive.

The figure below shows the number of daily cases with a LOWESS smoothing trend fitted for the period January 25th to May 16th.  The trend shows the number of daily cases peaked on Day 92 - circa April 25th - have have been trending downward since but the decline has been slowing and there may even be a slight upward tick.



Of course, it is not the number of new cases per day but the growth rate of total cases that is even more important and the goal should be to get it below 1 percent (and ultimately zero).  Italy, for example, is now seeing the growth rate of its total Covid-19 confirmed cases at about 0.4 percent.  But then despite initial stumbles, it has been following a stricter lock-down because it was hit much harder than other places.  Why is 1 percent important?  Well, at one percent growth it would take 72 days for the total number of cases to double.  At 20 percent daily growth - which was where Ontario was in late March - the total number of cases would double in just over three days.  If you want to get the pandemic under full control and have new cases not reignite a major spike that overwhelms the health care system, then you need that growth rate below 1 percent.  Ontario at present has seen the growth rate fall below 2 percent but the last few days have not seen it below 1.5 percent.  That is not good enough.

Ontario also appears to have a number of distinct regional pandemics under way as the next figure illustrates.  When the cases are sorted by public health units in terms of total confirmed cases per million and a two-unit moving average applied, here is what the picture looks like.
 

The highest rates of infection have been in Toronto and  Peel at 3,023 and 2,466 cases per million respectively.  There is then a drop off to a second tier in terms of severity and these health unit areas are Leeds-Grenville & Lanark (Eastern Ontario), Windsor-Essex, Durham. Ottawa, Haldimand-Norfolk, Waterloo, York and Lambton and they range from a high of 1,932 to a low of 1,713.  There is then another drop-off to a third tier consisting of the remainder going from a high of 1,291 cases per million in Niagara Region to a low of 150 cases per million in Algoma.  Note, that some of these regions are nowhere near 1 million people in population.  Thunder Bay District, for example, clocks in at 520 cases per million population but there are only about 140,000 people in the District so do the math and you can see the absolute numbers are quite small.

So, what is the long and short of this?  To date, the province has been pursuing a one-size fits all policy in dealing with the epidemic which was fine in dealing with the start of the first phases of the pandemic. However,  a one size fits all policy for re-opening given that some people are already slacking off on precautions is a bit of a concern especially in the parts of the province with higher case densities.  So, if we are going to open things up up at the same rate everywhere, everyone everywhere needs to continue exhibiting common sense and exercising personal caution and distancing measures.