Toronto mayor steps up pressure on PC MPPs over public health cuts
Thestar.com
April 30, 2019
Jennifer Pagliaro
As the province now considers offering one-time funding to help offset cuts to Toronto Public Health, Mayor John Tory is targeting MPPs in Premier Doug Ford’s PC caucus with letters outlining the risk of losing vital programs in their home ridings.
On Monday, Tory sent personalized letters to all 11 PC MPPs representing Toronto ridings, including Premier Doug Ford, who was elected in Etobicoke North. The letter outlined “front-line programs” delivered in their areas, which, Tory wrote, “are now under review and at risk of being severely curtailed or cancelled.”
Mayor John Tory’s letters to PC MPPs urges them to speak to Ontario’s health minister about reversing the public health cuts.
The letter contains a specific list of programs, including student nutrition in schools and child-care programs are which inspected “to reduce the risk of infectious diseases and other health risks.”
The letters end with a request from Tory urging MPPs to speak to Health Minister Christine Elliott about reversing the decision.
The letters follow news on April 18 that the province was changing the funding formula for cost-shared programs, with deeper cuts for Toronto than for the rest of the province.
In Toronto, the cut this year will be retroactive to April 1 and leaves a $65 million gap in the city’s budget. In order to fill that gap, Toronto would need to fund an additional $25 million to receive $40 million from the province under the new cost-sharing agreement. By 2021, that gap will grow to $107 million, with the city needing to spend an additional $42 million to make up the difference.
After a week of political rhetoric about what the cuts amounted to, a letter sent from Ontario medical officer of health Dr. David Williams to his Toronto counterpart, Dr. Eileen de Villa, outlining the cut, noted for the first time that the province will “consider providing one-time funding to help mitigate some of the financial impacts on the City of Toronto.”
The letter does not suggest how much funding might be provided.
Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the board of health, said that potential offer wasn’t acceptable.
“An indisputable body of evidence has shown that you need to increase funding in public health not cut it,” he said. “And so we’re not looking for bridge funding for a year only to lose lives in the future. We’re looking for a complete reversal of this short-sighted decision.”
The province’s letter to de Villa repeated a position outlined by Elliott on talk radio last week about why the cuts to Toronto are more severe.
“We are confident that the City of Toronto benefits from the necessary population size and density to more effectively realize the economies of scale to deliver public health with greater administrative efficiency,” the letter from Williams said.
At Queen’s Park on Monday, Elliott said Toronto Public Health needs to “stick with priorities” like vaccinations, supports for special needs kids, and the school breakfast programs.
“They did have an entire department just for advocacy. That’s one area that I don’t know is a priority,” she said, also panning the department’s study on what she characterized as “reinventing and reimagining the impacts of a changing Yonge Street.”
In 2018, the medical officer of health submitted a six-page report on a major staff proposal to remake part of Yonge St. in North York with bike lanes as part of a debate on that issue.
Tory continued to insist Monday, at an unrelated news conference, that there would be “human consequences” to the cuts, suggesting Ford’s government might have relied on a finance bureaucrat who “took a red pencil and struck a line through the public health expenditures.”
Political group Progress Toronto also planned to target the PC ridings on Monday, with a plan including robocalls, door knocking and flyers. A petition on their website urging the Ford government to reverse the cuts had reached more than 6,600 signatures as of Monday afternoon.
