MPPs defend cuts at Barrie city council

BARRIE --  

One week after Barrie council approved a very tight budget for 2020, the local MPP Doug Downey and Andrea Khanjin faced tough questions from council members over recent provincial cuts to municipal funding.

In their year-end review presentation, the two MPP's stood their ground and defended the cuts, saying the cuts are necessary to reduce the province's debt.

"We spend 36 million dollars a day in interest in the debt, provincially," Downey told councillors.

"We could build a school every single day; it's such lost opportunity," he added. "We want to help people who are vulnerable. We want to help the homeless; we want to do our social services. That money is going to pay interest on the debt. We need to tame that, and so do municipalities."

In the 2020 budget, property taxes in Barrie will go up by 2.96 percent, about 0.95 percent of that is being attributed to cuts at the provincial level.

Barrie police says it lost almost a million dollars in funding for next year because of the provincial cuts.

"It puts us in a difficult position," said Lehman on November 26th, following a presentation from Barrie police. "Especially with the police service where we know there are pressures in our community, and we actually want to increase the level of service from policing."

According to Downey, more funding for policing is on the way. He says neither the police chief nor anyone in the chamber contacted him about cuts to policing.

"So it came as a bit of a surprise that there was a lot of angst about lack of funding for policing," he said, "had we received a call, you would know what you know now, which is there's an additional 1.8 million dollars floating to the city."

The $1.8 million police grant was announced the day after the budget was approved, and it will be split over four years.

Barrie Police told CTV News Tuesday evening that they couldn't comment at the time on the impact of the $1.8 million grant, but said they would look into the financial details and respond as soon as they have the necessary information.