Are municipalities efficient service providers?
Given that municipalities are not recognized in Canada’s Constitution, municipalities within the country operate predominantly as service providers. Local public services provided by municipalities typically include public transit, parks and recreation, land use planning, emergency services, roads, highways and bridges, economic development, emergency planning, public health, and solid waste. However, some municipalities claim to provide significantly more services, such as the City of Toronto offering over 150 local services to their community. This brings to question: how effective can a municipality be in delivering such a wide range of services?
The major consideration for the effectiveness of a municipality in their service delivery is the constraint of budgets. Since municipalities are prohibited from running a deficit in their operating budget, they must balance their budget. This restriction in the inability to include borrowing within the operating budget places a restraint on the annual expenditures that a given municipality can spend on the services and programs that they provide.
According to data from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the total operatine and capital expenditures spend on Roads in Ontario is approximately $7.9 billion. Across the country, Canadians are increasingly seen to be increasingly living in auto-dependent suburban nighbourhoods. These auto suburbias increased 17 per cent from 2006 to 2016, totalling 75 per cent of the share of population growth during the period. Returning to the question of service effectiveness, have municipalities across Ontario been effective in adjusting for the increase in automotive dependency by a significant number of Ontarians? Have municipalities adapted their budgets to account for the increase in automotive dependency? Has this been at the cost of other local service provisions? Future research into municipal budget allocation across local services over time would provide greater insight into these questions.
In my personal experience, minimal maintenance standards set out in Ontario’s Municipal Act, 2001 have often been observed to be unmet on a day-to-day basis during the winter, and are significantly worse during major snow or other weather-related events. Thus, I would argue that whether or not municipalities have increased their budget to account for the increase in automotive dependency, their budgets for Roads are still unsatisfactory in providing efficient services to ensure the safety of those who use them. However, as the number one expenditure of local services in Ontario by municipalities, there may be little room for an increase in roads expenditure without sacrificing the quality of another service. This highlights the unique challenged faced by municipalities due to their prohibition of running an operating deficit.
