Dear Editor:
It blows me away just how many mayoralty candidates are making campaign promises to fix things that are not within the municipality's mandate or responsible for.
Homelessness is the responsibility of both the federal and provincial governments to solve, as the municipalities do not have the funds necessary to properly impact this problem. I have been watching our federal government, abandoning their social responsibilities to provincial authorities, but the responsibilities that have been downloaded are not accompanied with the necessary funds to provide those services.
Now the province has three choices. They can refuse to accept responsibility for these services and pass the gauntlet back to the feds. They can accept the responsibility, with little or no financial resources which will require them to take money from other priorities to pay for it, or, as they have been doing, they simply let responsibility fall to the municipalities, with no money to pay for it, and nowhere they can turn to, to get the money or physical resources to impact this situation in an acceptable way, that does not takes resources from other priorities.
Truth is, the feds continue to collect taxes, and rather than spending that tax money where it was intended to be spent, they invent new things to spend it on, while downloading their responsibilities onto other levels of government.
Perhaps the feds should not be permitted to download their responsibilities onto the provinces, and provincial governments should not be permitted to download theirs onto the municipalities. This would leave each level of government with defined responsibilities. They cannot be allowed to pretend they have balanced their budgets, when they have downloaded their responsibilities onto other levels of government.
The bottom line is that the money for these responsibilities has already been paid for through taxes that have already been collected.
Wayne McQueen, Burnaby
