In October, the province’s financial accountability office predicted a $1.5 billion funding shortfall for the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services in 2025-26, a $2.4 billion gap in 2026-27 and a $3.1 billion deficit in 2027-28.
Yet that same ministry says it has made “historic investments in the development services sector,” including nearly $4 billion this year, as well $407 million over three years for agencies delivering ministry-funded services. Our very own Community Living Renfrew County South falls under this umbrella.
So who do you believe?
A government invested in the whole affair, and probably the biggest player involved? Or an auditor whose job it is to go over the books and make an objective report on how government spends its money?
As much as I like to value things like objective neutrality, it’s awfully difficult to live up to that when you have a party that behaves as badly as the government does. So that said, I simply don’t trust the government, especially this one. They struggle with telling the truth, telling the whole truth, and telling nothing but the truth, so help them God.
The auditor’s findings say that the system has been underfunded by some $7 billion dollars over a three year period, a number staggering in its scope. So staggering that the government’s claim to have spent nearly $4 billion this year alone, with a further $400 million to come over three years, simply comes nowhere near the auditor’s figures. And, just in counter-point, the auditor claims a $1.5 billion shortfall for the same calendar year the ministry claims they dropped $4 billion on alone. It’s nowhere close to adding up on any calculator.
And as to that government spending, if it was in fact released, where did it go? It sure as hell hasn’t seemed to trickle down into the system where it’s most needed. Although enough of it may have trickled down to satisfy executive salary demands at the local level. I believe the Executive-Director locally snagged herself a 10% raise all the while having to know that a labour dispute was coming and that wage demands would be part of it.
I talked to several parents, one of whom indicted that upon approaching CLRCS to enrol her child, was presented with a waiting list that I believe she said was 30 years long. I’m going to come right out and say that 30 years is an awful long time for a waiting list of any kind, let alone one that’s populated with adult children carrying around a lifetime sentence of autism.
If the ministry released $4 billion this year alone, it sure didn’t have any influence of any sort on the waiting lists for program acceptance. So it got siphoned off somewhere, and into something else. $4 billion its a lot of cash, the kind of cash that one should be able to notice in the system, especially in one year. But apparently not.
I wonder if the ministry is throwing in the cost of replacement workers and their expenses covering food, lodging, and transportation? I wonder if the security guards and private investigators and their expenses are included in this money? How many lawyers and political consultants skimmed off the top of that $4 billion? If so, then the $4 billion starts to make more sense, especially if it includes the absolute waste of taxpayer dollars specifically intended to keep the strike going, to freeze the workers out, and to throw a shroud of uncertainly and anxiety throughout impacted families around the province. It would be just like any Ford government ministry to claim they’ve invested billions, yet not say what they invested it in. I believe, hell I know, that these people are cynical enough to employ outside people to make everything worse, and then claim it as an investment in developmental services.
If so, they have full-on walked away from their mission statement and are deserving of condemnation for politicizing the care and support of a vulnerable population.
One of the great tests of what kind of society we are is the test of how we treat the most disadvantaged among us. On this file, the Ford government has failed the test of good citizenship.
And failed badly.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 