Bob Delaney
Member of Provincial Parliament
Mississauga-Streetsville Provincial Liberal Association
Riding Association Web Site
Sunday May 20, 2012
Summer in Mississauga is 31 days away!
Promise kept! Harris-era downloading reversed

Ontario continues municipal upload: court security

Ontario is providing the three municipalities in Peel Region: the cities of Mississauga and Brampton and the town of Caledon with funding for court security, and the transportation of prisoners. This year, Ontario will pay these costs, and save municipalities across the Province up to $125 million per year by 2018. This will give municipalities the ability to invest in local priorities, and minimize property tax increases.

The costs had been downloaded from the Province during the 1990s. Ontario feels as Mayor McCallion does, that costs for such servics as court security, prisioner transportation, and other provincial programs should not be paid from property taxes. This uploading removes these costs from the city, and pays them at the level of the Provincial government.

For Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon, which comprise Peel Region, this amounts to a savings in 2012 of nearly $9.4 million in the first phase of the program to upload court costs. Ontario's upload of court security costs is being phased-in over seven years. Provincial funding will reach a maximum of $125 million per year by 2018.

We view our relationship with the Mississauga City Council, and the Peel Regional Council, as one between partners. This is one of a series of steps taken in the past few years, and which will continue for much of this decade, to reverse the Harris-era downloading that forced municipal property taxpayers to bear costs for programs that should not be on the municipal tax base.

Other downloading reversed

It was called the Toronto Tax. Its official name was "GTA Pooling." Established during the dark days of the Conservative government in the 1990s, when forcd amalgamations stuck cities with the diseconomies of being a larger-scale entity than they needed to be, GTA Pooling meant that Mississauga and Brampton sent some $60 million annually to the City of Toronto, with the Mississauga share of that total being about $36 million at its peak.

Beginning in 2007, GTA pooling began its phase-out. During the six succeeding years, and concluding in the 2012-13 fiscal year, the Province has uploaded that Harris-era tax, another dip into the pockets of Mississauga taxpayers by the Conservatives.

As well, Ontario is uploading costs for the Ontario Drug Plan and the Ontario Disability Support Program. As with GTA Pooling, these provincial costs had been dumped on the municipal property tax base by the Harris-Eves Conservatives.