The Rainy River District Municipal Association wants no part in the creation of a District Social Services Administration Board (DSSAB) here to cope with the “download” of services.
The problem, it says, is that the board won’t having any taxing authority to pay for the services it will be responsible for–social housing, child care, and Ontario Works.
Public health and land ambulance are optional.
Instead, district municipalities will ask the province to pass an order-in-council allowing it to form an Area Services Board (ASB) here–with full taxing authority–because the legislation hasn’t been passed at Queen’s Park yet.
“We are already getting stuck with some of the bills,” argued Lake of the Woods Township Mayor Valerie Pizey. “We want to see the ASB so we can have a say in it.”
“I think we’ll be able to be a trial balloon for the province,” stressed Rainy River Mayor Gord Armstrong, who chairs the ASB working group, charging the province was wasting taxpayers’ dollars by demanding this interim board be set up–only to see it change once the legislation passed.
“Then you have to turn around and set up another. It may or may not be the same people,” he said.
Fort Frances Mayor Glenn Witherspoon, who’s also the in-coming president of the RRDMA, noted that during all his meetings in Toronto over the past year, the municipal/provincial transition teams focused on ASBs.
“At that time, the word DSSAB never came out,” he stressed.
It wasn’t until Tory MPP Joe Spina, parliamentary assistant to Northern Development and Mines minister Chris Hodgson, visited the area last week that municipal leaders were told they would have to form DSSABs, Mayor Witherspoon added.
And at Saturday’s annual general meeting, a team of advisors from the ministries of health, community and social services, and northern development and mines told municipal leaders to have their DSSAB proposals in by March 31–or the province would do it for them.
That includes a format for representation, division of costs, boundaries, consent (the majority of the local partners representing the majority of the population), and the approval process.
Proposals will receive approval no later than May 31.
About 10 will be created across Ontario, with the province to meet the costs of the unincorporated areas for now, noted Margaret Hughes with the Ministry of Community and Social Services in Toronto.
“Consolidation agreements must also fully cover the unincorporated areas,” she told RRDMA delegates.
It will not deliver those services to the First Nations areas unless it is requested or contracted out.
Ernie Lane, advisor with the Ministry of Northern Development in Thunder Bay, said the province was working all along on that deadline for an ASB proposal.
But with the Legislature prorogued before bill made it to second reading, the ASB proposal won’t get another first reading now until April or May.
“The work that they have done has not been wasted,” he stressed yesterday. “[The DSSAB] could transfer over to an ASB once our legislation is passed.”
Meanwhile, residents of unincorporated areas welcomed the transitional board. Cliff McIntosh, who attended Saturday’s RRDMA meeting as a non-voting delegate, said they wanted to make sure those people who deliberately withdrew from organized area had a say in what was going on.
“We really want good representation in the planning process,” he told ministry reps.
For unincorporated areas, representatives will be appointed to the DSSAB at a community meeting, Lane said. Under the proposed ASB legislation, those reps would have to be elected at municipal election time.
Meanwhile, NDP leader and local MPP Howard Hampton didn’t know how effective an order-in-council would be, noting that was strictly a Cabinet document.
“They could probably create an ASB by an order-in-council but it would not have any powers of taxation,” he warned.
“We’re trying to get clarification on that,” Lane noted, saying the ministry’s legal department was looking to see if it could be done.
But by switching over to a DSSAB, Kenora MPP Frank Miclash (Lib.) charged the Harris government was slapping its whole ASB concept in the face.
“What I felt in this room . . . is I felt a great amount of frustration and uncertainty,” he said Saturday, noting area municipalities still didn’t know how they would cope with the “download.”
Even though they plan to lodge a protest, Mayor Witherspoon admitted the district probably would end up making a few minor changes to its ASB proposal and sending it in by the March 31 deadline.
“Hopefully we won’t have to do that but in reality, we probably will,” he said. “I don’t think our order-in-council will ever see the light of day.”
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
