Making People a Priority: Re-Investing in Social Services
A Brief to the Ontario Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs by Laurel Rothman (February 13, 2004)
Making People a Priority: Re-Investing in Social Services
The Government of Ontario stands at a crossroads as it prepares for the 2004 Budget. Faced with a $5.6 billion deficit left by the previous government, your face a complex and difficult challenge to reduce this deficit and fulfill a mandate for change promised to Ontario voters during the election campaign.
It is abundantly clear today that the previous government’s aggressive tax-cutting agenda and reductions to public services in the name of balanced budgets and economic prosperity were not effective. On the contrary, Ontario now faces an enormous financial burden and significantly weakened public services in the wake of this short-sightedness. In the fall, voters resoundingly expressed their frustration at the ballot box. They wanted change: leaders who listened and acted responsibly; public services that were not stripped to the bare bones; a strong economic future; and prosperity that could be shared by all the province’s residents.
Your government has listened. In the first four months of your mandate, you have begun to deliver real and positive changes, despite significant fiscal challenges. You have signaled that yours is a government of compassion, accountability, and commitment to all of the people of this province. Among the positive steps that Family Service Association of Toronto has noted:
- You have ended the demonization of the province’s most vulnerable citizens, those whose voices have gone unheard for too long.
- You have acknowledged that external factors play a role in the plight of vulnerable citizens; that these individuals are not always wholly responsible for their unfortunate situations.
- You have signaled that public service does indeed matter and have worked to rebuild vital links between the province and such groups as teachers, doctors and nurses.
- You have demonstrated an understanding of the plight of our province’s cities and are working with them to create positive change, committing funds and time to finding solutions.
- You have shown your commitment to giving the children of Ontario the best possible start in life with the creation of the Ministry of Children’s Services.
Family Service Association of Toronto recognizes that—particularly at this early stage of the Liberal’s four-year mandate—these are important steps toward a brighter future and we commend you for these.
We also recognize that in preparing the 2004 budget, you face an uphill challenge to deliver on the will of the people; collaborate with and address the demands of municipalities, universities, health care organizations and schools; and operate within the current fiscal constraints. We offer this document in the spirit of partnership, recognizing that your government cannot be everything to everyone. We do propose, however that it can be many more things to many more people.
We believe that the province needs to reinvest in social services as a critical step toward improving the quality of life for all Ontarians. All reasonable options, including tax increases, should be considered to generate revenues for this purpose.
Valuable work by and for undervalued people
The non-profit social service sector is a critical part of Ontario ’s ability to develop and maintain economic strength and social well being in all communities. Often under-recognized, we deliver valuable services that would otherwise fall to the government or, in our absence, overburden other areas of government responsibility, such as the judicial system and healthcare.
Over the past eight years, however, the provincial government has reduced its involvement in the social services sector in the name of balancing budgets and reducing taxes. While public sector cuts receive the bulk of attention from media, cuts to social spending are just as damaging and affect the most vulnerable citizens in our society. The result has been not only an erosion of critical services for Ontarians, but enormous fiscal pressure that threatens the continued viability of the non-profit sector.
Hundreds of non-government organizations provide vital public services and, as this government prepares the 2004 budget, it is important that these organizations receive the same degree of attention as others in public service.
Family Service Association of Toronto is one such organization.
Family Service Association of Toronto is among the largest players in the voluntary sector. We are a government partner and a major transfer payment agency. With offices and staff located across Toronto, we serve Torontonians who are most at-risk of being marginalized or excluded, including people with intellectual disabilities, victims of abuse and their abusers, seniors, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered individuals, as well as families undergoing separation and divorce.
The work we do to strengthen vulnerable families and communities is critical. These are families, individuals and communities that are disadvantaged, who lack access to family support services due to barriers such as income or discrimination based on ethnicity, language, race, age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, political or religious affiliation. Their marginalization makes them easy targets for program cuts, yet these families and individuals are hardest hit by the withdrawal of supports.
Shared priorities
Family Service Association of Toronto shares this government’s vision for a fair and prosperous province for all; and its commitment to protect and improve public services.
In November, newly appointed Minister of Children’s Services Dr. Marie Bountrogianni expressed your government’s “ determination to put the best interests of children at the forefront of all of our government programs.” Like you, we want a better Ontario for children. We work to eliminate child poverty, hunger and homelessness through our Social Reform unit’s leadership in the national, provincial and local Campaign 2000. We also deliver services to families with young children through our COPE program, which involves parents and children at high-risk schools in workshops to develop stronger community networks.
Family Service Association believes there is strength in diversity. In January, you announced plans to expand opportunities for immigrants with a $4 million investment to remove the barriers to employment for internationally-trained professionals . We know that appropriate employment for internationally trained professionals is a priority for a number of the newcomer communities we work with. Immigrant families are among the most vulnerable in our society and many of our programs, including Violence Against Women, Social Reform, services for individuals with intellectual disabilities and children’s services, address their needs specifically. Our staff have the capacity to respond to our clients in Greek, Arabic, Farsi, Bengali, Bosnian, Somali, French, Hungarian, Hindi, Punjabi, Italian, Macedonian, Tamil, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Urdu, and Gujurati. Our work with newcomer families has extended far beyond our initial partnerships with the Iranian, Tamil, Somali and former Yugoslavian communities to embrace other groups from the Horn of Africa, Bangladesh , Afghanistan and elsewhere.
We applaud your decision to appoint MPP Laurel Broten to develop a package of reforms tackling domestic violence. Our Family Violenceprograms, delivered in partnership with the Ministry of the Attorney General, provide personal and group counselling, public education and criminal justice advocacy regarding domestic violence with women victims, child witnesses, sexual abuse survivors and male batterers. Our Violence Against Women programs, delivered in partnership with the Ministry of Community and Social Services, focus on prevention as well as provide added services to deal with the unfortunate fact that abuse is not going away.
In partnership with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, we also offer community services for seniors and people with disabilities to be able to live with dignity, whether independently or in other settings.
The scope of our work—only a snapshot of which is provided above—and the variety of programs and populations served under our agency’s umbrella is, in our mind, a real source of strength. It offers the opportunity to innovate and to learn across various boundaries; it allows us to provide a broad range of services to individuals and families more holistically and seamlessly; and, it offers concrete economies of scale in the administrative and other support systems required to deploy these services.
Our funding reality
For 90 years, Family Service Association of Toronto has addressed the needs of Toronto ’s marginalized and vulnerable citizens.
Our efforts to establish economic stability and deliver high-quality services, however, are threatened by the current funding realities. Certain government-funded programs, such as Purchase of Service for Counselling, which enabled low-income people access to counselling at our agency, were cut in the mid-1990s. We have been forced to attempt to deliver these services in the absence of adequate funding as a result.
While inflation in Ontario has risen by 16 per cent since 1995, Family Service Association of Toronto’s government funding has remained stagnant for eight years. In real dollar terms, therefore, our funding has shrunk as the cost of business has increased.
In the context of this shrinking funding, we have had to address increasing demand for services to seniors, women, children and individuals with intellectual disabilities in the wake of public service cuts to child care, welfare and social housing. Meanwhile, our administrative costs continue to increase at fair market rates under our collective agreement.
Year over year, we have struggled to absorb the funding shortfall at the expense of valuable programs.
Provincial governments are traditionally the largest funders of non-profit and voluntary organizations. Under the funding regime of the last decade, agencies like ours have been forced to dedicate considerable resources away from service provision toward fundraising. Reductions in government funding have not been offset by increased individual or corporate donations however. It is estimated that for every dollar generated in fundraising revenue, five dollars have been removed from government funding.
Moreover, fundraising does not address the critical issue of core administrative and operational costs. There is a growing trend among private donors toward program-based or earmarked funds. Funders often won’t support administrative costs, desiring that their money be used for direct services only. Such stipulations mean that we continue to struggle to cover the ‘back-end’ costs that support these programs and the organization’s continued existence. In this funding context, less popular but much-needed programs lose out in the funding equation.
This funding reality has forced our agency and other social service and non-profit organizations like us to operate in an ongoing state of insecurity. As a large, established and reputable organization, FSA is fortunate to be able to tolerate a degree of temporary uncertainty. Smaller organizations have not been so fortunate.
Even so, the ongoing insecurity of the past decade has taken its toll on our agency. As a consequence, we face retention issues, staff burnout and closures of effective programs.
Family Service Association of Toronto feels it is time to break this cycle of volatility.
Breaking the Cycle
As Katherine Scott notes in Funding Matters: The Impact of Canada’s New Funding Regime on Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations (Canadian Council on Social Development, 2003), “there is a real and timely opportunity to modify funding strategies and reverse their unintended consequences.”
This government must take advantage of this opportunity with the 2004 budget. Ontarians require a new funding strategy for social spending in order to stave off a collapse of vital services in communities across the province. This is not a handout. It is an investment in the economic and social health of Ontario .
The answer does not lie simply in ‘shuffling the deck’. The current funding dollars cannot be reallocated more effectively. The reality is there is just too little government money directed to this sector. Ontario needs to reinvest in our province’s non-profit social services.
Recommendations:
- Restore funding to levels that will adequately support our social service network again. This is a priority for many Ontarians. And it affects all of the province’s citizens, not just the most vulnerable.
- We implore the government to consider all reasonable options to identify or generate revenues for this purpose, including fair tax increases. The aggressive tax-cutting agenda of the previous government has contributed to the mismatch now identified between revenues and expenditures. It has directly contributed to the weakening of public and non-profit social services. It is time to reverse this trend and protect and improve our public services.
Laurel Rothman is Director of FSA's Social Reform Program and National Coordinator of Campaign 2000
