What’s taking Ottawa, Ontario so long to rescue our cities?

Tick tick tick. Time is running out at Toronto city hall. When city manager Chris Murray first told us about the financial crisis facing the city’s government caused by COVID-19 on April 3, he reported that the city — taking a hit of about $65 million each and every week — had about enough funds to sustain operations through June 1. I

know calendars aren't getting a lot of use these days, but trust me: it’s almost June.

Time's almost up.

And rescue still hasn’t come. More than six weeks after Toronto first sounded that alarm, urging the provincial and federal governments to provide Toronto funding to avoid financial disaster, Mayor John Tory is still waiting for a firm commitment from Premier Doug Ford or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ( Other towns and cities, facing similar financial catastrophes, are waiting too.)

Actions taken in the mea time by the city have pushed back the deadline a bit. Workers who couldn't be redeployed into priority areas like shelters or long-term-care homes have been put on emergency leave. TTC service has been scaled back to account for low ridership. But these moves amount to a puny little umbrella that can’t deal with the storm. The city's estimates show a whopping $1.5-billion budget shortfall by the end of the year, and that could be optimistic.

Faced with this, Tory has ramped up the pressure, giving variants of the same speech at several of the COVID-19 press conferences held at city hall last week. It’s gotten a little repetitive, frankly, but the message is important — and the mayor has made a strong case.

He has pointed out, for example, that Toronto is not legally permitted to run an operating budget deficit, meaning there’s no ability to temporarily sustain services with debt. Tory has also argued that t Toronto has been smacked down whenever it has had the temerity to ask for additional powers to raise revenues, so the city has no access to measures like sales taxes or income taxes that will grow revenue when the economy improves.

So while there’s no getting around that governments will have to pay a cost for the pan demic, the federal and provincial governments are capable of doing so in a long-term way that protects low-income people.

The alternative that leaves paying for the pandemic to municipal governments inevitably involves steep increases to fares and user fees, and service cuts.

And cutting municipal services while the province and country are trying to recover would be incredibly short sighted. Municipal services like homeless shelters, affordable housing and public transit make the difference for people teetering on the edge of poverty.

Full and fair recovery is impossible if vulnerable people are just going to be left to fend for f themselves.

So why then has it taken so long for Trudeau and Ford to commit to a rescue package? A lot of it is the same old story: intergovernmental squabbling.

Last week, when asked about bailouts for transit agencies, the provincial government blamed the federal government, and the federal government blamed the provincial government. These jurisdictional arguments are the kind of thing politicians spend a lot of time dealing with, but they mean absolutely nothing to the aver- aage person.

The service worker who just needs the TTC to offer enough capacity to allow for safe, physically distanced travel does not care at all whether their bus driver’s salary is covered by Queen’s Park, Ottawa or City Hall. They just want to know the bus will show up tomorrow.

Similarly, Toronto would really like to know whether Ford and Trudeau will show up with money to keep sevices going into June. That it’s taken so darn long is troubling for what is seems to reveal about provincial and federal priorities, but there’s still some time left on the clock to demonstrate an understanding of the importance of local services — and a commitment to sustain ing them.

Just, please, hurry it up. Twitter: @GraphicMatt