Lessons at the library

Is this really how they’re making public policy at Queen’s Park these days?

On Wednesday, the Star reported that the Ontario government was cutting a $700,000 annual grant to the Toronto Public Library for operating a “virtual reference library.”

The city librarian warned the cut would have a serious impact on the library system. Not at all, responded Culture Minister Eleanor McMahon. The library’s “base funding” wouldn’t be touched. The cut was just for a service that’s being used by fewer and fewer people; the money would be going to other areas. Twenty-four hours, a press release and a tweet later, all had changed. New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo quickly dug up figures showing that use of the “virtual library” was actually going up, not down. And Margaret Atwood, a doughty defender of libraries, tweeted about the effect on the “hugely beloved public institution.”

Apparently that’s all it took for the minister to pull a 180 and announce that the grant wouldn’t be cancelled after all.

Bizarrely, she claimed to have made an “evidencebased decision” to cancel the grant for the virtual library. But the actual evidence that DiNovo was able to produce within hours pointed to precisely the opposite conclusion. So the minister abruptly reversed the decision she had so robustly defended just one day earlier.

In the end, Toronto Public Library will get the money it expected to get. So there’ll be no impact on services.

But the incident sheds a troubling light on how such decisions are made (and then sometimes unmade). It seems clear that the “evidence” the minister used to make her decision was badly outdated. Once the full situation was known, it didn’t stand up.

In the scheme of things, a grant of a few hundred thousand dollars to the library ranks pretty low when the government is allocating tens of billions of dollars. But the way this was handled raises the question: what other, more consequential decisions are being made on the fly with equally flimsy evidence?

What other, more consequential decisions are being made on the fly with equally flimsy evidence?