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The province’s social service agencies are facing a huge funding crisis, and it’s time for the government to take action, protesters said Tuesday at a rally outside the Ontario legislature.
Hundreds of people from a wide spectrum of agencies braved unseasonably cold temperatures at Queen’s Park to call on the Liberal government for more consistent financial support.
Fred Hahn, secretary-treasurer of CUPE Ontario, said because social service agencies must reapply for funding every year, they are increasingly unable to deliver all the services they should.
“Most agencies can’t plan for what they know is needed in their communities because they don’t have core funding or multi-year funding,” said Hahn, a former social worker.
Social service agencies count on the provincial government for 54 per cent of their funding on average, though some depend entirely on Queen’s Park to keep them going.
Hahn said when he worked with developmentally disabled kids in Toronto, there wasn’t enough money to provide day-care and education services, and that’s still the case today.
He said some mothers would drop their child off on the weekend and simply never come back, knowing that under the law, the child would be placed into children’s aid programs for kids of unfit parents. In those programs, the developmentally disabled get priority for full-time help.
“They were at the end of their rope, saying, `I can only get support for my kid if I abandon her. … I’m going to abandon my kid, so I can be declared a bad parent, so they can fall into children’s aid and get support.”‘
Problems like these, Hahn said, are popping up provincewide. He said it’s not uncommon for children needing mental health services to wait a year to see a counsellor.
Bobbye Goldenberg, a social worker in Cambridge, Ont., said she’s familiar with the problems Hahn described, noting waiting lists in Waterloo Region have surpassed eight months.
“The risks are huge for those children,” she said.
Robin Silverman, who works with the homeless at a Toronto community centre, said inconsistent government funding leads to high burnout rates among workers at agencies like hers.
“Staff are in situations where we don’t know year to year whether we have jobs,” she said.
Silverman said such uncertainty is unacceptable for people who play such an important role in the lives of others.
“This is not benevolent work. This is not something we do out of the goodness of out heart. This is a social responsibility. It could be you, it could be me (needing these services).”
Labour Minister Steve Peters acknowledged there is a need to come up with a new funding strategy for social service agencies, but stopped short of committing to the multi-year, core funding approach advocated by those at the demonstration.
“I think we’ve demonstrated as the government that we do value those services,” he said, pointing to a $200-million investment in services for the disabled that is committed to multi-year funding.
But Peters said that doesn’t necessarily mean the government can afford to commit to the multi-year approach on a wider scale.
Hahn said he’s not impressed with the investment because the government has provided few details on how the money will be spent.
“They’ve done a lot of talking in the right way. They’ve made some minor investments that sound major.”
NDP Leader Howard Hampton also said the government has a long way to go.
“We have to make this investment now or we’ll pay for it four or five years down the line,” he said, explaining that when people don’t get the social services they need, the public ends up paying for it eventually through the health-care or justice systems.
Roger Breen, a homeless man who’s been using shelters for the past six months, said he worries the one he uses now might close down.
“People really do need it,” he said. “It can be tough out there.”
