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Two uneven playing fields

May 2, 2019   ·   0 Comments

EDITORIAL

PARTICULARLY WHEN IT COMES to provision of government services, the importance of having level playing fields cannot be over-emphasized.

Yet in Ontario uneven playing fields tend to be the rule rather than the exception.

Take, for example, the matter of highway maintenance. As one example, Airport Road was built through Dufferin by the Province as a development road to make it easier for Torontonians to reach Georgian Bay, yet calls for it to be made a provincial highway were rejected by successive governments, the result being that the considerable cost of upkeep continues to be borne by property taxpayers in Peel, Dufferin and Simcoe.

Bad as that situation has always been, it was worsened in the late 1990s when the Mike Harris government opted to balance its budgets by selling off the Highway 407 toll road for a relative song and dumping thousands of kilometres of provincial highways on local municipalities by claiming that the roads were all “primarily for local use.”

In some cases the claims – invariably lacking any statistical support – led to only portions of key highways being downloaded, examples being Highways 2, 5, 7 and 9, all of which had been seen as key provincial arteries since the 1920s.

Nowhere is the absurdity of that move more obvious than in Dufferin County. Although a case could be made for downloading Highway 25, Highway 24 between Shelburne and Collingwood and Highway 9 west of Orangeville were clearly routes where most of the traffic was not locally generated. Like Airport Road, 24 was used mainly by traffic from the Greater Toronto Area bound for Georgian Bay in the summer and the Blue Mountains in winter.

To the best of our knowledge, no origin/destination traffic counts have been made of any of the downloaded roads, but we are confident that such a survey would confirm that both Dufferin 109 and its counterpart in Wellington carry more traffic than the surviving portion of Highway 9 between Harriston and Kincardine.

As a result, Huron County taxpayers pay nothing toward the cost of maintaining the provincial highway while Dufferin and Wellington property owners pay all the cost of keeping 109 in shape.

Clearly, a level playing field would see the Province paying its fair share of the maintenance cost of all busy highways, whether or not they are “King’s Highways.”

It wasn’t until this week that we learned of a similar situation in the area of policing, when Orangeville Council was told that local municipalities policed by the Ontario Provincial Police are paying only about $360 per household, with the remainder of the cost being borne by provincial taxpayers.

Obviously, a level playing field would see charges for the local policing by the OPP based on the actual cost, which would be in the area of $800 per household.

We’re left wondering how long it will be before the Ford government awakens to the fact that eliminating the subsidization of local policing would go a long way toward balancing its budgets.

And if that does happen, a lot of municipalities will rue the day they killed off their local police forces in hopes of saving taxpayers a lot of money.

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