TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
Government budgets determine the state and well-being of our society and us as its citizens. How will they affect us? Will they improve or worsen our lives? How do we learn about these budgets and can we participate in setting their priorities?
Take our city’s proposed new operating budget for 2013. The size of it defies comprehension: $9.42 BILLION (that is $ 9,420,000,000!) It approaches two and exceeds the budget of four of our 10 provinces. How then is it being set this year? In the past, we used to do so with media coverage and public input stretched over many months.
The budget is composed of two parts: capital and operating. The capital part deals with the physical infrastructure of our city over the next 10 years to 2022; the operating part with the human infrastructure this year only. The capital part can borrow money to be repaid over many years. The operating part cannot go into debt but must be balanced each year.
The capital part used to be debated and approved during two months in the fall and the operating part during two months in the spring. This had the advantage of providing some fiscal flexibility. More accurate expenditures and surpluses were known in the spring and the operating budget could be adjusted accordingly. This was no longer is possible under the Ford administration, that compressed and squeezed the entire budget process into a short month and a half gravely interrupted by the Christmas and New Year holidays. This is a time when everybody, both the public and politicians, are busy and occupied with their private lives—and their own personal budgets.
The Ford budget process will have lasted only 25 working days from its unveiling on Nov.29 to a final city council vote on it starting Jan. 10. Citizens and organizations anxious to comment on the budget had only five working days after its publication to find it and study the thick, complex document before having to register for a perfunctory public consultation by the budget committee three days later. The traditional five minutes for presentations were cut to three for the around 200 deputants. Committee members appeared disinterested. They asked few questions.
The compressed Ford process follows the tactics of past and present right-wing provincial and federal governments who introduce enormous legislative omnibus bills within tight time frames. Overwhelm everybody with too much material and not enough time. Public discussion, understanding and input is not part of the agenda. The less informed people are, the more they can be swayed by repeated simple-minded slogans.
A clamour for public participation in budgeting, however, is growing (search Google: “participatory budgeting”). It started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1998. There 25,000 citizens allocate 20% of the total city budget. The process has spread to more than 1,200 municipalities across the world. It is democracy in action. It enables ordinary community members to directly decide how budget money is allocated and spent.
In Chicago’s Ward 49 in 2010, over 1,600 citizens voted on how to spend $1.3 million in discretionary funding received by each ward. Last year in Calgary, 24,000 citizens participated in a review of core services preparing for a public participatory budget process by 2016. Since 2002, the Toronto community housing corporation (TCHC) allows tenants to allocate $9 million in capital funds.
All these activities enhance a sense of community and social cohesion so often lacking today. They counteract the feeling of helplessness, cynicism and alienation preventing so many citizens from voting in what we persist in calling “democratic” elections where a minority of voters can exercise total control as in today’s federal government. As for Ford’s budgets, they continue to concentrate on our city’s physical infrastructure needs and neglect its human infrastructure needs. By proposing to freeze all city department budgets for 2013, inflation eats away directly at citizen services. (Remember our mayor’s election promise he would find so much gravy his cuts would not affect any city services—GUARANTEED!) He now uses his mayoral staff and neglects his mayoral duties in favour of coaching a high school football team helping boys. At the same time he reduces access to overall city recreation for everybody, including all youth, by increasing user fees this year.
