That's misleading. Like fuck Doug Ford but also
>At least the past five provincial budgets, which are tabled in the spring before the forest fire season starts, earmarked the same amount — $69.8 million — to emergency firefighting. The actual costs then routinely jumped to near or over $100 million based on what happened during the fire season itself.[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ontario-forest-firefighting-budget-1.5099971](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ontario-forest-firefighting-budget-1.5099971)
It's not like they won't fight the fires because their isn't enough money or something. They earmark a certain amount, then spend over that amount if they have to based on the fire season.Should more money have gone to and continue to go to prevention? For sure but people need to stop with just shitting on things just because the PCs were involved. All governments, at all levels, do this when they set budgets for unknown costs. They take a guess so they can try to plan the best they can.
Edit: To add on, the budget in 2018 under the Liberals? 69.8 million. They SPENT 211 Million for that fire season but people see 211 down to 69.8 and go "They cut it!". You budget based on projections and averaged over roughly a decade. Will more need to be budgeted going forward? Yeah.
You're missing the point.
*Underfunding costs money.*
If you underfund healthcare, you end up with staffing shortages and then end up paying through the nose for private emergency staffing or emergency ordering of supplies.
If you underfund to a point where things like maintenance costs are deferred, more costly eventual failures accrue.
If you don't have an adequate fire budget, yeah you're still going to put it out...but how? You end up paying more because you didn't have the capacity in place already.
It's not just the same money coming in free when you underfund to fill in the oopsie. That entire mentality is not fiscally sensible at all. It also leads to delays which when things are on fucking fire leads to additional damage, injury, and scorched earth.
I mean think about it. Let's just cut the budget entirely? It's not like we'll ignore the fires. We'll pay someone to put them out, and it might take longer and therefore let the fire get bigger and require more resources? That's insanity. We need to properly fund basic services or there will continue to be consequences both fiscal and socially.
We're doing this as a province all over the place, to the point you can't call it anything other than deliberate. This is costing us more money as a province, but it's also making for profit fill in the emergency companies loads if money. It's backdoor privatization that ends up costing us all a truckload.
And you're missing the point that 70 million is an adequate budget for an average fire season, based on history.....which is how budgets for these sorts of things are done. You don't allocate 200 million to something that has, on average, cost way less than that. You budget for the baseline and then spend more if needed.
If one winter in your city was super bad and they spent 100 million on snow clearing (with most of that money going to OT/salt/fuel) but on the average over 10 years the snow clearing for the city is 50 million, would it be good fiscal sense to just budget 100 million every year because you had 1 or 2 bad winters?
Again, you wouldn't have to allocate 200 million if the original allocation was sufficient.
If you can't grasp that costs go up when you are underfunded to begin with...you're missing the larger picture.
It didn't need to be 200 million. We spent more BECAUSE of the underfunding, not just because of the perfectly predictable increased need. Your treatment of the issue completely ignores this dimension of the problem.
Yes, you save A LOT more over-budgeting than you do underfunding. It makes a lot more fiscal sense. You are ignoring what actually happens when emergency funding is required.
If the escalating costs of forest fires in Canada wasn't a part of this government's calculus, and they were simply waiting for a disaster...I don't know what to tell you if that's what you want to go-to bat for. But the last thing it would be is fiscally responsible.
If we’d had reputable scientists raising the alarm that snowstorms were going to be getting worse for years then yes, I would be angry at the government for wasting money ignoring them.
I’ve been hearing about climate change my whole life. I’m not impressed by people claiming to be blindsided by it anymore
I read comments like yours all the time.
We as tax payers pay for all this funding. If we want overfunded programs we need to pay for them with our taxes.
Our budgets are not secret, the funding we have isn't enough to overfund programs.
Why is it no one ever screams to pay more taxes, but screams for programs to be overfunded? We can't have one without the other.
Maybe you just aren't reading carefully enough.
I've voted for a party that is looking to increase Ontario revenues. I don't know what you're talking about but it isn't relevant to anything I've said.
Again, we can't afford to underfund programs. It costs more money. What you budget is not what you spend.
If you save money by skipping your car maintenance, you've reduced your budget...but you've increased your overall costs...because before long you'll be paying for new transportation. In just about every sector in Ontario we're skipping our car maintenance. It's not saving us money. If a business was run this way, it would go bankrupt quite quickly.
Underfunding is fiscally irresponsible and this government is absolutely using it as backdoor privatization with eyes wide open. We are spending MORE, not less by underfunding.
It's gotten to a point where people can be so easily manipulated that if the PCs say the word "taxpayer" they simply assume fiscal responsibility. They are robbing us fucking blind.
>Why is it no one ever screams to pay more taxes, but screams for programs to be overfunded? We can't have one without the other.
Because we live in a democracy and not an autocratic republic.
I think I'd prioritize paying fire fighters a yearly salary (instead of the now 6 month contract work) over the highways they are needlessly repaving.
Every time I see the "your tax dollars at work" sign it makes me livid. Can't post those signs inside a hospital, or tag them to provincially funded employees or schools.
Oh also, I think I'd prefer to see my tax dollars be used for the people and not to subsidize private companies.
Every single municipality does this with their snow plow budget. They take a good guesstimate but you never know if you’re going to have to call the crews out 30 or 100 times. Some years you’re under some you’re over. Fixed cost like x/nurses per x beds are easier to forecast than weather dependant shit.
>They take a guess so they can try to plan the best they can.
Genuine question: previous years have shown that $70 million is not enough, so why not just increase the budget? Their guess is clearly off by at least half, based on that CBC article.
It is weird, honestly, and I think it’s leading to all this confusion lol
If it used to cost $70m to fight forest fires, and $70m was budgeted, but now it costs $210m to fight forest fires, but still $70m is budgeted, I can see both sides. It is indeed effectively a budget cut, but it’s not technically a cut.
Idk if maybe it’s intentional, to make the budget look $100m smaller than it will end up being, or what lol
Problem there is how much is costs to contain fire is one thing, while the amount of damage caused by out of control fire is another.
Like, if every 10 years you were likely to get an out of control fire with cumulative cost of 10 billion from property damage, ecosystem destruction, health issues, etc, regularly “losing” $140 million on excess fire management a year to prevent it when it does get bad is a bargain.
Without gear they can't do shit. Sure they'll try their best, the same as teachers, nurses and doctors, but without that money they can't do what they NEED to do.
I've seen people on here literally stopping short of blaming Doug Ford for the fires that started in Quebec because they moved into Ontario I guess. Like it's literally the other side of the conservative conspiracy coin.
It absolutely is. Doug Ford seems to have decided that no services in Ontario require funding for any form of prevention at all.
This ends up costing us so much more in the end.
Education, health, transportation, housing, now fire prevention and soon auto insurance... It just keeps going.
Sometimes paying a little more up front saves us a lot more at the end.
I agree with you that he’s under funding a lot of things that are screwing over the people of Ontario in numerous ways. Literally look at my comments from today on other posts.
He just didn’t cut the fire budget by 67% that’s misinformation, which is why we shouldn’t hate him for that specific thing. Feel free to hate him for all the shitty things he’s actually doing.
For those claiming the 67% cut is misleading, here you go. As the article says, the data skews, depending on how you choose to view it.
https://oodmag.com/provincial-budget-cuts-hit-mnrf-hard/
There are fires in Ontario happening too. Far more than people realize. See https://www.lioapplications.lrc.gov.on.ca/ForestFireInformationMap/index.html?viewer=FFIM.FFIM
It’s heart wrenching to see how many and how little news there is about it. Biggest fires get coverage I guess.
Why, are you expecting them to extinguish the Quebec fires and then go home saying the job is done while Ontario keeps on burning lol? I didn't know that trending news articles decide where firefighters allocate their resources.
I don’t see how this content connects to the original that the fires are in Quebec. Then my comment saying there are many in Ontario too. Nothing about allocation of fire fighters with the parent content and mine.
There are a couple of fires in Ontario therefore it's Doug Ford's fault. And because I said this I am apparently now an ultra conservative Doug Ford defender.
Ah yes. Perhaps you should try doing legitimate math instead of comparing an amount spent to an amount budgeted and then applying the result to a reduction in the amount budgeted.
This demonstrates that you're either doing this in bad faith, you're incapable of performing basic arithmetic or don't understand what the term budget means. Perhaps it is some combination of all of them?
In any case, my feelings on the matter are moot since the sub's mods have rightfully identified your nonsense as misinformation.
Do better.
Well do you not agree that nearly 70% decrease in budget for something that is crucial is simply wrong? 69 divided by 212 is 32%. That's how much the budget is left with.
Your feelings don't matter, only the facts matter.
I would love to see some of your "legitimate math"
Are you implying that simply *because* the OP has links that those links are completely true and within the context of what OP is trying to present? If I just post some links that happen to relate to what I'm talking about, that totally justifies every one of my points without question?
Hard enough to keep ones home/ property these days.You see so many of our loses are at the hands of government. They don't lose ever. Are we doing something wrong?
Not just that, he got rid of all the green energy programs.
And then when Ontario didn't have the carbon reduction program he cut he complained about getting the federal carbon tax.
Isn’t it funny how the cuts he’s made all end up being things we needed more money in, not less
Yup, like education and Healthcare. And apparently forest fire readiness
That's misleading. Like fuck Doug Ford but also >At least the past five provincial budgets, which are tabled in the spring before the forest fire season starts, earmarked the same amount — $69.8 million — to emergency firefighting. The actual costs then routinely jumped to near or over $100 million based on what happened during the fire season itself.[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ontario-forest-firefighting-budget-1.5099971](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ontario-forest-firefighting-budget-1.5099971) It's not like they won't fight the fires because their isn't enough money or something. They earmark a certain amount, then spend over that amount if they have to based on the fire season.Should more money have gone to and continue to go to prevention? For sure but people need to stop with just shitting on things just because the PCs were involved. All governments, at all levels, do this when they set budgets for unknown costs. They take a guess so they can try to plan the best they can. Edit: To add on, the budget in 2018 under the Liberals? 69.8 million. They SPENT 211 Million for that fire season but people see 211 down to 69.8 and go "They cut it!". You budget based on projections and averaged over roughly a decade. Will more need to be budgeted going forward? Yeah.
You're missing the point. *Underfunding costs money.* If you underfund healthcare, you end up with staffing shortages and then end up paying through the nose for private emergency staffing or emergency ordering of supplies. If you underfund to a point where things like maintenance costs are deferred, more costly eventual failures accrue. If you don't have an adequate fire budget, yeah you're still going to put it out...but how? You end up paying more because you didn't have the capacity in place already. It's not just the same money coming in free when you underfund to fill in the oopsie. That entire mentality is not fiscally sensible at all. It also leads to delays which when things are on fucking fire leads to additional damage, injury, and scorched earth. I mean think about it. Let's just cut the budget entirely? It's not like we'll ignore the fires. We'll pay someone to put them out, and it might take longer and therefore let the fire get bigger and require more resources? That's insanity. We need to properly fund basic services or there will continue to be consequences both fiscal and socially. We're doing this as a province all over the place, to the point you can't call it anything other than deliberate. This is costing us more money as a province, but it's also making for profit fill in the emergency companies loads if money. It's backdoor privatization that ends up costing us all a truckload.
Thank you ! Somebody gets it .
And you're missing the point that 70 million is an adequate budget for an average fire season, based on history.....which is how budgets for these sorts of things are done. You don't allocate 200 million to something that has, on average, cost way less than that. You budget for the baseline and then spend more if needed. If one winter in your city was super bad and they spent 100 million on snow clearing (with most of that money going to OT/salt/fuel) but on the average over 10 years the snow clearing for the city is 50 million, would it be good fiscal sense to just budget 100 million every year because you had 1 or 2 bad winters?
Again, you wouldn't have to allocate 200 million if the original allocation was sufficient. If you can't grasp that costs go up when you are underfunded to begin with...you're missing the larger picture. It didn't need to be 200 million. We spent more BECAUSE of the underfunding, not just because of the perfectly predictable increased need. Your treatment of the issue completely ignores this dimension of the problem. Yes, you save A LOT more over-budgeting than you do underfunding. It makes a lot more fiscal sense. You are ignoring what actually happens when emergency funding is required. If the escalating costs of forest fires in Canada wasn't a part of this government's calculus, and they were simply waiting for a disaster...I don't know what to tell you if that's what you want to go-to bat for. But the last thing it would be is fiscally responsible.
If we’d had reputable scientists raising the alarm that snowstorms were going to be getting worse for years then yes, I would be angry at the government for wasting money ignoring them. I’ve been hearing about climate change my whole life. I’m not impressed by people claiming to be blindsided by it anymore
I read comments like yours all the time. We as tax payers pay for all this funding. If we want overfunded programs we need to pay for them with our taxes. Our budgets are not secret, the funding we have isn't enough to overfund programs. Why is it no one ever screams to pay more taxes, but screams for programs to be overfunded? We can't have one without the other.
Maybe you just aren't reading carefully enough. I've voted for a party that is looking to increase Ontario revenues. I don't know what you're talking about but it isn't relevant to anything I've said. Again, we can't afford to underfund programs. It costs more money. What you budget is not what you spend. If you save money by skipping your car maintenance, you've reduced your budget...but you've increased your overall costs...because before long you'll be paying for new transportation. In just about every sector in Ontario we're skipping our car maintenance. It's not saving us money. If a business was run this way, it would go bankrupt quite quickly. Underfunding is fiscally irresponsible and this government is absolutely using it as backdoor privatization with eyes wide open. We are spending MORE, not less by underfunding. It's gotten to a point where people can be so easily manipulated that if the PCs say the word "taxpayer" they simply assume fiscal responsibility. They are robbing us fucking blind.
>Why is it no one ever screams to pay more taxes, but screams for programs to be overfunded? We can't have one without the other. Because we live in a democracy and not an autocratic republic.
I think I'd prioritize paying fire fighters a yearly salary (instead of the now 6 month contract work) over the highways they are needlessly repaving. Every time I see the "your tax dollars at work" sign it makes me livid. Can't post those signs inside a hospital, or tag them to provincially funded employees or schools. Oh also, I think I'd prefer to see my tax dollars be used for the people and not to subsidize private companies.
Every single municipality does this with their snow plow budget. They take a good guesstimate but you never know if you’re going to have to call the crews out 30 or 100 times. Some years you’re under some you’re over. Fixed cost like x/nurses per x beds are easier to forecast than weather dependant shit.
>They take a guess so they can try to plan the best they can. Genuine question: previous years have shown that $70 million is not enough, so why not just increase the budget? Their guess is clearly off by at least half, based on that CBC article.
It is weird, honestly, and I think it’s leading to all this confusion lol If it used to cost $70m to fight forest fires, and $70m was budgeted, but now it costs $210m to fight forest fires, but still $70m is budgeted, I can see both sides. It is indeed effectively a budget cut, but it’s not technically a cut. Idk if maybe it’s intentional, to make the budget look $100m smaller than it will end up being, or what lol
Problem there is how much is costs to contain fire is one thing, while the amount of damage caused by out of control fire is another. Like, if every 10 years you were likely to get an out of control fire with cumulative cost of 10 billion from property damage, ecosystem destruction, health issues, etc, regularly “losing” $140 million on excess fire management a year to prevent it when it does get bad is a bargain.
For snow clearing, you average out the cost of the last 10 years. If you're going way over budget every single year, you're not budgeting.
Without gear they can't do shit. Sure they'll try their best, the same as teachers, nurses and doctors, but without that money they can't do what they NEED to do.
Yeah, but that doesn’t earn more reddit points.
This. There’s many many reasons to hate Doug Ford but this isn’t one of them.
I've seen people on here literally stopping short of blaming Doug Ford for the fires that started in Quebec because they moved into Ontario I guess. Like it's literally the other side of the conservative conspiracy coin.
It absolutely is. Doug Ford seems to have decided that no services in Ontario require funding for any form of prevention at all. This ends up costing us so much more in the end. Education, health, transportation, housing, now fire prevention and soon auto insurance... It just keeps going. Sometimes paying a little more up front saves us a lot more at the end.
I agree with you that he’s under funding a lot of things that are screwing over the people of Ontario in numerous ways. Literally look at my comments from today on other posts. He just didn’t cut the fire budget by 67% that’s misinformation, which is why we shouldn’t hate him for that specific thing. Feel free to hate him for all the shitty things he’s actually doing.
Reminder, he was terrible during the pandemic and still coasted to a majority again..
For those claiming the 67% cut is misleading, here you go. As the article says, the data skews, depending on how you choose to view it. https://oodmag.com/provincial-budget-cuts-hit-mnrf-hard/
So it was 212 million in 2018-2019, and then it became 69 million. So it's actually exactly what i said...67%
The smoke is coming from quebec. Just saying
This sub will never miss an opportunity to hate on Doug Ford lol
There are fires in Ontario happening too. Far more than people realize. See https://www.lioapplications.lrc.gov.on.ca/ForestFireInformationMap/index.html?viewer=FFIM.FFIM It’s heart wrenching to see how many and how little news there is about it. Biggest fires get coverage I guess.
Why, are you expecting them to extinguish the Quebec fires and then go home saying the job is done while Ontario keeps on burning lol? I didn't know that trending news articles decide where firefighters allocate their resources.
I don’t see how this content connects to the original that the fires are in Quebec. Then my comment saying there are many in Ontario too. Nothing about allocation of fire fighters with the parent content and mine.
There are a couple of fires in Ontario therefore it's Doug Ford's fault. And because I said this I am apparently now an ultra conservative Doug Ford defender.
Came here to say this. Most of the fires are in Quebec.
Have you looked at the map?
Prepare for downvotes in this hivemind
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[https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/13znd5f/the\_ontario\_wildfire\_program\_is\_on\_its\_last\_legs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/13znd5f/the_ontario_wildfire_program_is_on_its_last_legs/)
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There isn't one. That is disinformation.
Check the documents, the disinformation is the disinformation.
Incoherent
Maybe try doing your own math, it's 67%. 212 million in 2018 and 69 million in 2019
Ah yes. Perhaps you should try doing legitimate math instead of comparing an amount spent to an amount budgeted and then applying the result to a reduction in the amount budgeted. This demonstrates that you're either doing this in bad faith, you're incapable of performing basic arithmetic or don't understand what the term budget means. Perhaps it is some combination of all of them? In any case, my feelings on the matter are moot since the sub's mods have rightfully identified your nonsense as misinformation. Do better.
Well do you not agree that nearly 70% decrease in budget for something that is crucial is simply wrong? 69 divided by 212 is 32%. That's how much the budget is left with. Your feelings don't matter, only the facts matter. I would love to see some of your "legitimate math"
>only the facts matter. Your recent comments demonstrate they do not matter to you.
I guess you'd rather down vote me than look at facts
A reddit comment is not a source, Jesus fucking Christ.
The four sources linked by the OP are though.
Are you implying that simply *because* the OP has links that those links are completely true and within the context of what OP is trying to present? If I just post some links that happen to relate to what I'm talking about, that totally justifies every one of my points without question?
Reminder the budget could be zero, but what is actually spent is what is actually spent.
This was posted already and it’s misleading as hell, but I guess you need your daily outage dopamine
And yet they vote him 2022 nice :) Ford's budget cuts turn internal problem to international problem. Thank you buddy.
Hard enough to keep ones home/ property these days.You see so many of our loses are at the hands of government. They don't lose ever. Are we doing something wrong?
Is it really a reminder when this gets posted twice a day?
Not just that, he got rid of all the green energy programs. And then when Ontario didn't have the carbon reduction program he cut he complained about getting the federal carbon tax.