Members of the committee, good morning.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today on behalf of Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador and to share messages from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, or FCM.
My name is Deatra Walsh. I am the director of advocacy and communications with MNL, the organization representing the 275 municipalities in this province.
I come to you today with a heartfelt and strong message from the leaders and staff in our communities.
Municipalities are the country's biggest partners in providing, and supporting the delivery of, programs and services to residents, but they can't do more with less.
My opening statement draws upon the themes from FCM's pre-budget consultation submission, namely municipal fiscal stability, infrastructure, climate resilience, housing, and safe, healthy communities. I'm looking at these things through the lens of Newfoundland and Labrador, and I acknowledge that they align with MNL's six strategic priorities.
Newfoundland and Labrador is an outlier, I would argue, on the national municipal stage. We are unique. We have one municipality with more than 100,000 people; 75% of MNL's members are communities with fewer than 1,000 people. We lack a regional governance system. Our municipal legislation is outdated and there are many spaces in which our members have not been long-term active players—such as transit, climate action and housing, for example—because they have not had to be. They simply lack the capacity to do so in a fulsome way.
This sounds like a story of doom and gloom, but it's not. It's a story of opportunity. Learning from and working with the outlier means making real and meaningful change possible for everyone. Most of our members operate on very lean budgets and with rising debt ratios, and over the course of the pandemic municipalities have had to make budget cuts. While the safe restart funding enabled our members to breathe a sigh of relief, the truth is that our municipal reality remains unsustainable. As one mayor once said, you can't cut basic. Our members are stretching themselves as far as they can, but with the rising cost of inflation and the added pressures to fill in gaps where other service providers simply cannot, it is a losing game. Downloading cannot occur without proper resourcing.
I invite the committee to discuss with me the 11 resolutions we are going to put forward at the AGM. They are an interesting comment on the fiscally precarious situations of municipalities here. We echo FCM's call for a new municipal growth framework and a tripartite approach to accessing new revenue tools.
How am I doing on time?