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In a recent blog post, Ottawa Citizen journalist and blogger David Reevely was critical of a few aspects of our recent Ontario Municipal Report Card. In his post entitled: Why I don’t trust the Canadian Taxpayers Federation about anything (apparently disagreeing with one data point in a single report is enough to discredit 23 years of work… Perhaps we should have titled this blog “David Reevley is a complete blathering idiot in every aspect of his life”… but that kind of hyperbole shows poor judgment) he points out that if we had mixed regional and local municipalities together it would have changed some of the numbers in the report.  That is correct, it would have changed the numbers. However, we intentionally decided not to organize our report this way. We believe that proportionately applying regional employees into city figures using mathematical assumptions would have made our report less accurate and irrelevant for holding cities accountable to taxpayers.

Based on his logic of combining Sunshine List data from separate levels of government, we could have included government employees from school boards, universities, hospitals, crown corporations, heck maybe we could have also included federal and provincial employees onto this giant report card!

Obviously, this would have been counter to our objective. Our report has given taxpayers an indicator of how their individual municipal government has performed and an opportunity to see how local politicians, bureaucrats, and department heads are compensated. Our report offers taxpayers a tool to hold their mayors and city councilors responsible for their spending decisions. If we had followed Mr. Reevely’s suggestions and what he calls “the more challenging math” of pro-rating regional governments across lower-tier municipalities, our figures would share blame or credit across two levels of government, thereby not giving local taxpayers any idea of how their local council was performing.

Reevely levies a secondary criticism about the exclusion of regional governments like Peel and York but the inclusion of Durham. Regional governments create a problem for the report because they split services and costs of a municipality between two separate governments. We acknowledge this issue very clearly in our report; there would be inevitable flaws in any method we chose to address this divide. We chose to include Durham and not the other regional governments because a larger portion of the municipalities within Durham – Whitby and Pickering for example – were too small to be included in our report. Whereas regional governments of Waterloo, Peel, and York all had significant representation in the report from municipalities that fall within these regions, Durham would have been underrepresented. It is our hope that in future reports, we can include more municipalities and regions to give more taxpayers across Ontario an indication of how their local and regional tax dollars are being spent.

A final criticism is that because not all cities deliver the same services, our report card compares apples to oranges. Poppycock. Just because governments organize themselves differently does not mean we cannot compare them. Taxpayers don’t get to choose which projects their governments undertake, and yet, taxpayers are the ones ultimately stuck paying the bill.

Our Municipal Report Card aims to shine light on local governments in Ontario. This is the least reported on and least understood level of government, but arguably the most important in our daily lives. We were successful in engaging taxpayers and the media to the issue of municipal spending growth, and breaking down some of the confusion surrounding municipal issues. We took static data from the Sunshine List and turned it into a dynamic report that compares cities to themselves over time and to their neighbours. Our report offers a snapshot of the way municipalities are managed.

With the caveats we stated, and the barriers we faced in gathering consistent and uniform information, we delivered an accurate and meaningful report on the state of municipal governments in Ontario. The CTF has no special access to government resources or data, and therefore, given the imperfect information we faced, we chose a methodology that was the most straightforward and consistent.

We stand by the accuracy of this report.

We appreciate constructive criticism of our work, and will always consider new and effective ways to organize future reports. As we make improvements, we will continue to deliver information and analysis about how tax dollars are spent, and we will not stop releasing reports just because we encounter gaps in government data or difficult comparisons.

Candice Malcolm, Ontario Director

Nick Bergamini, Research Director