Finding a balance between impact and taxpayers’ savings

Ontario environmental commissioner Dianne Saxe was in Peterborough Thursday checking out an innovative “green” project when word came out she will be losing her job.

It is unlikely that auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, who will be handed Saxe’s responsibility for monitoring the environment, will come back next year to see the results of that project, which turned a strip of unused asphalt into grass and shrubbery.

Lysyk already had a big job that just got bigger. She won’t doing tours to show that someone at Queen’s Park is paying attention to the environment at the grassroots level.

Ditto for ombudsman Paul Dube, who will replace both the provincial children’s advocate and French language services commissioner.

Shutting down those three regulatory offices as of May 1 was one announcement that came out of Premier Doug Ford's government’s first fiscal update. It is consistent with two of Ford’s bedrock goals: Reducing both the size of government and Ontario’s deficit and debt load.

The effect on the environment, children’s rights and French language opportunity will be hard to measure.

Not having commissioners out on the public relations trail won’t make a difference.

But unless some staff from their offices transfer over to the auditor general, oversight and protection will be reduced.

The fiscal update statement didn’t deal with future staffing levels but given Ford’s focus on smaller and less expensive, transfers will likely be minimal-to-zero.

On the other hand is the question of whether those commissioners are just another layer of bureaucracy, as Ford supporters would say. Do they add value to what the Ministry of the Environment, Ministry of Community and Social Services and other agencies already do?

And as the province runs $14.5 billion in the red on this year’s budget and the accumulated deficit nears a record $350 billion, aren’t potentially painful rollbacks necessary?

Those are tough questions. The Ford government tends to answer them in very black and white fashion.

A thoughtful review of what those three commission offices do now, how effectively it is done and what needs to be done in the future is required before the changes take effect next spring.

Another announcement out of the fiscal update will affect Peterborough’s razor thin one-per-cent rental vacancy rate – or will it?

The Conservatives are ending rent controls for all newly constructed housing.

That’s a change from a Liberal government policy adopted last year that extended controls to any and all rental units.

Whether taking controls off will spur developers to build more apartments, and whether more supply would reduce the cost of renting, is debatable.

Until last year, any rental housing built after 1991 was not subject to rent controls. Yet all those decades of freedom from controls did not stop the current shortage from happening.

Pro and anti-control sides can both quote studies and statistics to back their positions, partly because rents are not dependent on any one factor. The cost of land, labour and materials are powerful drivers of whether housing gets built, and what type.

What is known is that many lower income earners are being squeezed by rent costs.

The Ford government’s policy should be considered an experiment.

Unless more units are built and become more affordable, rent controls will have to go back on.