Numbers tell a dismal story

Among the many stories vying for public attention this week were Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) budget deliberations and a wellattended meeting by a local watchdog group that calls itself Nova Scotians for Equalization Fairness.

The two events are intertwined, for the difficulties of the former seem to stem directly from the charges of the latter.

Let’s start with council which displayed obvious reservations despite unanimously approving an operating budget of just under $147 million for 2018-19.

That may sound like a lot of cash but, in fact, it’s about $2 million less than CBRM’s 2017-18 operating budget. Combine that with the fact that all core expenditures (engineering and public works, police services, fire services, fiscal services and others) have increased and it’s fairly obvious that important needs are going to be put on the backburner.

“It’s not a hold the line budget, it’s a hold your nose budget,” stated Mayor Cecil Clarke, who cautioned that the downward trend could continue with future budgets.

All of this came just one day after council narrowly approved a $34-million capital budget by a 7-6 count.

Here there was plenty of angst expressed over the measly $4.4 million aside for road upgrades.

“To think that we’re getting just one collector road done in the whole CBRM should be an embarrassment to our provincial government and our federal government because we don’t have programs in place in place where we can acquire the necessary funds to fix our streets,” said Deputy Mayor Eldon MacDonald.

But a suggestion, for instance, that $9 million ($4.5 million in each of next two fiscal years) set aside for major reparations to Glace Bay’s Bayplex be reconsidered didn’t gain any traction.

So what does council do? What can it do when municipalities are mandated by law to produce balanced budgets?

And this is where our attention turns to the Nova Scotians for Equalization Fairness, a group that includes such well-known names as former CBU professor Jim Guy and Rev. Albert Maroun.

Their first public meeting on Monday attracted an estimated 100 concerned citizens and they are claiming that the province is withholding more than $200 million a year in equalization payments from Cape Breton.

They also claim that Nova Scotia will receive $1.838 billion this year as an equalization payment from the federal government yet will only distribute $32 million to its municipalities.

While the Cape Breton Regional Municipality collects $15 million of that amount, Nova Scotians for Equalization Fairness says that’s less than one per cent of the $239-million payment the CBRM deserves.

This is not a new issue as former CBRM mayor John Morgan’s battle for equalization fairness effectively ended in 2009 when the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the municipality’s appeal.

But in an era of stagnant economic growth and outmigration it does cut to the core of CBRM’s inability to effectively meet all of the needs and expectations of its citizens.

Want things to get better? Well, unless you’re prepared to pay higher taxes why not talk to your local MLA? Maybe they can explain where all that equalization money from the federal government goes.