The City of Kelowna just got a $622,000 federal grant to create a program to battle stigma for indigenous people dealing with addictions.
While that sounds like a good thing there’s a catch to it – once the program is established who pays to keep it going?
The money comes from Health Canada’s Substance Use and Addictions Program that has granted millions to cities across the country. Kelowna is the only Thompson-Okanagan city to get grants so far. This is their second.
The federal program is an example of what it, and provincial governments, have been doing for decades – subtly, and not so subtly, downloading senior government responsibilities and costs to municipalities.
“How downloading occurs is, first the government creates a vacuum then encourages local governments to fill the vacuum with grants,” Columbian Institute associate Gaetan Royer told iNFOnews.ca. “Cities are kind of forced, by their sense of responsibility to their citizens, to fill that gap.”
Royer is co-author of a 2014 report from the institute called ‘Who is Picking Up the Tab? Federal and Provincial Downloading onto Local Governments.’
READ MORE: Decades of downloading on cities led to homelessness in Kamloops, Okanagan today: report
Before that, in 2007, he published the book ‘Time for Cities’ which includes a chapter called Downloading for Dummies.
“Downloading is always made to appear to be in the public interest by the governments who have decided to get rid of an inconvenient function,” he wrote in that chapter.
“Municipal officials who resist downloading always end up fighting what seems like a good idea to their constituents. For the layperson, the fact that ‘my city is being asked to promote disease prevention’ always appears to be in the public interest, simply because health is in the public interest.”
Health care is a provincial responsibility with large financial contributions from the federal government and not the responsibility of cities.
But, given the opioid overdose crisis in B.C. along with increasing homelessness and mental health issues, local governments are taking on more and more responsibility.
The Kelowna grant is one of dozens listed on the federal government website, many of them going to Victoria and Vancouver.
It provides two years of funding but there’s nothing in a report going to city council on Monday about who will pay to keep that program going if it’s deemed worthy.
It’s a common ploy by senior governments to offer grants or fund pilot projects in many different areas, Royer wrote.
Once they’re up and running and the public likes them, cities are pressured to pay to keep them going once the funding runs out.
It’s far more than health care that has been downloaded.
In the 1950s and 1960s federal funds paid for things like water and sewer systems. Now, local governments have to compete for grants to replace them or pay for them on their own.
Once they’re built, it’s up to the local ratepayers to keep them going.
“Cutbacks in services implemented by provincial and federal governments inevitably create new demands for municipalities,” Royer wrote in Downloading for Dummies. “For example, most cities now have to cope with increased demand on their fire department resources responding to an increasing number of medical calls because of reduced availability of provincially funded ambulance services.”
Some cities actually invite downloading.
The most recent example of that is the newly elected City of Vancouver mayor and council who are hiring 100 nurses.
Not only is the city not equipped to be running nursing services, it also doesn’t get funding from senior governments to do so, Royer said.
“What choice is there for municipalities other than looking after people?” he said. “That’s the dilemma.”
In 2021, the City of Kelowna got $3.2 million from the Strengthening Communities’ Services Program, funded by both senior governments, for a number of initiatives to cope with homelessness.
That included 18 months of funding to maintain its overnight camping area for the homeless but, as a one-time grant, the cost of doing that falls on the city once it runs out.
