If you think Ford’s cuts so far are bad, get ready ...

Municipal governments across Ontario are feeling caught between a rock and a hard place by the Ford government’s announcement that it will provide $7.35 million for freelance auditors to review spending and find efficiencies.

Aside from the natural suspicion about provincial meddling in local government, there’s the justifiable fear that Ford’s team of auditors will be programmed to follow his government’s partisan ideological bias, in which case they’ll be recommending even deeper service cuts, privatization and who knows what else.

The truth is most municipal governments already do value for service audits, so this will be duplication. But that doesn’t mean there will be no efficiencies found, which brings us to the hard place.

If mayors and councils don’t demonstrate openness and willingness to take part in the audits, they’ll be perceived as not being welcoming to savings opportunities. That’s not a good look for local elected officials caught between Queen’s Park and anxious taxpayers.

That anxiety is not misplaced. Ford’s government has already made deep cuts to municipalities, legal aid, tree planting, flood prevention, artificial intelligence and health research, public health units and emergency and policing services.

And according to Ontario’s independent Financial Accountability Officer, Peter Weltman, Ford will need to find another $6 billion in savings in order to balance the budget on schedule and deliver promised tax cuts.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner put it succinctly: “If you think that people are upset about the cuts the Ford government’s already made ... they’re going to be especially upset when another $6 billion of unannounced cuts happen over the next three years.”

And the anxiety isn’t just about the draconian nature of the cuts. Increasingly, they also appear to be poorly planned with little or no understanding of the impact on citizens.

For example, the government is ending all out-ofcountry medical coverage as of Oct. 1. That will mean, among other things, that people who rely on regular dialysis to cleanse their blood due to malfunctioning kidneys will not be able to leave the province.

According to Health Minister Christine Elliott, this didn’t occur to her ministry as it planned cuts. Now they’re scrambling to put patches in place to address that and other problems not foreseen due to haste and poor planning.

If that single anecdote doesn’t fill you with confidence, you’re in good company. What other impacts has the government not foreseen?

Even people who should benefit from the cuts aren’t happy. The end of out-of-country OHIP, for example, should benefit private insurers as they’ll step in and charge Ontarians for what used to be covered by OHIP.

But instead of being thrilled, the association that represents insurers, the Canadian Association of Financial Institutions in Insurance, warned recently that the government is moving too fast and hasn’t communicated effectively.

It seems we’re dealing with a government that doesn’t consult, doesn’t listen to what it hears when it does and isn’t overly concerned about collateral damage. That’s legitimate reason for anxiety.

The anxiety isn’t just about the draconian nature of the cuts. Increasingly, they also appear to be poorly planned with little or no understanding of the impact on citizens.