Mississauga News Guest Column: January 31, 2007
Moving the city of Mississauga forward

One of the challenges of representing a riding in Mississauga is changing a preconception at Queen's Park that our community is full of wealthy, young, affluent families who do not need social services. Our changing demographics create new social pressures: Our seniors, Mississauga's fastest-growing demographic, require new and refurbished older adult centres, while our newcomers require broader access to services for new Canadians. Every Mississauga resident needs better community access to heath care.

Mississauga MPPs are pushing hard to make our point - and our government is getting the message.

In October, the Minister of Health announced an additional $23 million to help nine 905-region hospitals deal with rapidly-growing communities, including almost $3 million for Credit Valley Hospital (CVH). The Minister of Health worked with me to deliver CVH's fourth linear accelerator for cancer treatment a year ahead of schedule. In addition, Trillium's expansion is underway, the new William Osler facility opens in 2007 and Credit Valley's Phase II starts in the 2007-08 fiscal year.

This fall, Credit Valley Hospital opened its Family Medicine Teaching Unit. Mississauga can now teach young doctors at Credit Valley, while those new doctors learn medicine right here at UTM. That's the sustainable way to grow the doctors we need right here.

The Mississauga-Halton Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) is up and functioning, and we should see more responsive plans and resource allocations in health care in Mississauga as a result.

The Ministry of Education is listening too: One hundred new schools will be built across Ontario with $137 million specifically targeted to high growth areas. It was no coincidence this announcement was made in rapidly-growing western Mississauga.

When it comes to managing growth issues in 905 communities like Mississauga, there is more to do, and we need the federal government to put back some of the tax cash that flows out of Ontario.

A full forty percent of Ottawa's surplus comes from Ontario. Ontario would receive an additional $1.1 billion to support funding for health care, social services, and education if Ottawa would just keep its promise to address the imbalance provincial per capita funding.

The 905 Belt is short-changed by approximately $280 million annually, including $107 million right here in Peel. The last provincial government set up an unfair tax distribution system, called GTA Pooling, (informally called the Toronto Tax) in 1998 to help the newly-amalgamated City of Toronto fund its social assistance deficit.

In 2005, Peel Region paid $485 million into GTA Pooling. In the 2006 fiscal year, the Toronto Tax estimate for the Region of Peel was $64.3 million - approximately $40 million of lost revenue for the City of Mississauga, revenue that would otherwise be supporting the social service needs of our own city.

Ontario will do a Provincial-Municipal Fiscal and Service Delivery Review to analyze the funding relationships and I have urged Municipal Affairs Minister John Gerretsen to include the issue of GTA pooling in his review, with the goal of eliminating this unfair redistribution of the tax money Mississauga residents generate, and need to keep in our city for projects we very badly need done.