Thread by @gordperks

1. Yesterday the Chair of the Board of Health @joe_cressy held a presser on cuts to public health. The Province sent an operative down to City Hall to undermine Joe. The operative succeeded because he told such a complex lie that most people are fact checking the wrong thing.

2. The operative said that we had overstated the size of the cuts and the cut only amounted to "one-third of a percentage point of the City of Toronto’s annual budget".

3. The press are being quite diligent about finding out who is right about whether or not we have overstated. That's good. However, the other part of the lie is going unremarked.

4. The "one-third of a percentage point" bit was deliberate. It implies that the City can easily cover the provincial cut. A few media outlets have picked this up. TVO even came up with a modest dollar figure to save student nutrition. Thing is it's not true.

5. To arrive at 1/3rd of a percent the Province has taken the public health cut as the numerator and the City's total budget as the denominator and used it to suggest that we can easily save all the public health services.

6. Let's look at the denominator first. The Province used our gross budget instead of our net budget. But, the non-net spending is simple flow through. We can't save a dime if we cut any of that. Let's look at why:

7. Fully 25% of the gross budget is flow-through from other governments. They pay us to deliver services on their behalf. We can't cut it.
Over 10% is TTC fares. Other user fees are nearly 10%. These service are by law either break even or money losers. We have nothing to "cut"

8. Let's look at whats left: the biggest is Police. We could find some here, BUT the Police Chief is allowed to appeal to a provincial body if he feels we cut too much. How do you think that would go?

9. Our other emergency services (paramedic and fire) are both reporting that their response times are creeping up. Who wants that to get worse? Next is debt repayment. Can't cut that.

10. Then there is the municipal share of cost-shared programs: Public Health, child care, housing supports, etc.. These costs go up as the Province downloads. Then there's our share of the TTC. The only thing Torontonians agree on is that we should have more transit, not less.

11. I could go on, but no-one would read to the end. Instead, I ask that you remember when Rob Ford hired KPMG to find the gravy. They told us about 95% of what we did was core service that we couldn't or should cut.

12. Now, the numerator. We are still trying to parse the Provincial budget. They have simply not told municipalities where all the cuts are. One big one we know about is repairs to the TTC. That's a billion. We could borrow, but have to repay.

13. We also are expected to pick up a portion of the Premier's new transit construction scheme. No reasonable guess is possible on how much this would be. It will not me small.

When the Province dropped Cap & Trade it eliminated funding we needed for our climate plan.

14. The budget has loose language that may cost the City money in other areas: childcare, housing, policing, TCHC, employment and social services, Toronto Hydro, and more. It probably won't hit all of these, but as we learned with Public Health, we should worry.

15. There's also something about changing how property assessments work someday. Assessments are the foundation on which property tax works. This could be a worse problem than all the others. Or maybe not. They haven't told us.

16. In summary, we have maybe 5% as much room to pick up costs as the Province says we have AND the costs are much bigger than just Public Health. If we had a real numerator and denominator I might be able to tell you how bad it is, but, the Province won't give us all the numbers

17. This is the confusion the provincial operator and his masters at Queen's Park want to sow. They've got us chasing around untangling their spin. That's because they don't want to stand up and say that they are cutting stuff we all depend on. They are liars.