Final Thought: Going down

You may have noticed a trend recently, and by recently, I mean sometime after the British North America Act.

Here’s how it goes. Provinces complain that the federal government is downloading the responsibility for funding things onto the province.

That’s it. That’s how it works.

It has ever been such. Canada has always had the issue that subnational governments have to assume the responsibility for issues that they don’t have the capacity to manage or the incentive to take on.

I may be a little cynical when I say it started with the British North America Act. Indeed, up until the 1990s, the federal government took responsibility for many things. At its peak in the 1940s, the federal government covered 90 percent of the funding for the nation.

But they didn’t provide the services directly. To simplify how it works, the federal government collects taxes and oversees things that affect the entire country, such as the postal service, national defense, the supreme court, passports, federal income tax, and employment insurance. The provinces are responsible for affordable housing and homeless supports, education, health care and hospitals, provincial taxes, and the age of majority. In order to cover the cost of these programs, the provinces collect their own taxes, as well as receive substantial grants from the federal government, aka transfer payments.

But in the 1990s, the federal government took the Canada Assistance Plan, which gave money to provinces for social programs and the Established Programs Financing, which provided transfer payments for healthcare, and created the Canada Health and Social Transfer system, then cut the amount it was transferring by six billion dollars, forcing the provinces to scramble to cover the cost of healthcare and social programing.

By 1998, the provinces had $41-billion less to run these programs.

That was hard on the Provinces. Like, really hard. They’re sort of obligated to run things like the healthcare system.

But because they were getting less money from the federal government, it meant that a larger portion of their budget had to go to healthcare.

Which meant they started pulling funding from other things, like social housing.

Which meant that municipalities, who depended on services like social housing to house people unable to afford other housing, had to start picking up the responsibility for social housing.

Here’s the thing: prior to 1970, the Federal Government was responsible for nearly all social housing.

In early 1992, (according to a paper from the Parliamentary Research Branch; no, I don’t know all this stuff off the top of my head, I’m just pretty good at researching things) the federal government tabled a constitutional proposal calling for an end to its financial involvement in a number of areas of provincial jurisdiction—things like tourism, mining, urban affairs and, you guessed it, housing.

According to research done by Jen St. Denis, in a piece for The Tyee, (some other people do research, too…) social housing starts, which were over 30,000 at the start of the 1970s, fell to less than 1000 by the start of this century.

Meanwhile, the population kept growing, housing demand kept rising, and across the country the cost of an average home has spiked from $570,000 in 2020 to $718,700.

And who is responsible for social housing? In many places across Canada it is the municipalities that are picking up the slack. Sometimes, it’s not any level of government, but non-profit organizations that work to find shelter for the homeless.

Are you seeing a trend here? The federal government abdicates its responsibility (actual or just presumed), and it falls on the provinces. The provinces, unable to add the additional burden to their portfolio pass it on to the municipalities.

And if the municipalities are unable to cover the costs? It becomes the responsibility of you and I.

Poop, as the old saying goes, runs downhill. So do expenses, apparently. However, despite what Ronnie told us, wealth doesn’t.

The district is facing a similar situation. You might have noticed the feature-length story that takes up most of the paper? This is what some councillors are worried about: that the responsibility for the social side of Tumbler Ridge is going to be downloaded onto the non-profit groups in the town.

As a taxpayer, I can understand why they might want to do that. Even before the budget process starts, the district is facing a ten percent increase in how much taxes are going to be going up for next year, and that’s after a ten percent increase to taxes last year.

And while Tumbler Ridge still has some of the lowest tax rates in the province (there are only six towns—out of the 159 that reported tax rates (two didn’t)—that pay less than us), it’s always upsetting to see the cost of anything going up ten percent year over year.

But as a volunteer and board member in a number of groups name checked in the report that went before council? It feels a little bit like we’re in the crosshairs.

I know that many councillors said the report discussed was for information only, but that’s because it’s September. You can bet your bottom tax dollar that come budgeting season, the information contained in this report is going to have a lot of sway in deciding which groups—if any—to fund.

And without District funding, it’s going to be hard to find other sources of funding to keep these groups up and running.

We’re going to start getting into budgeting season very soon. My advice? Fasten your seat belts. It could get bumpy.