BY CRAIG GILBERT
No pain, no gain: that?s the message from Ward 4 Councillor Ted Callaghan after Greater Sudbury took something of a beating in a recent national quality of life report.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities released their Quality of Life report last week. It surveys 20 cities across the country, most of which have populations much larger than Sudbury.
Among participants only Kingston is smaller, and only Regina, Windsor and Saskatoon are comparable in size.
?You have to have guts to have one of these studies done,? Callaghan said. ?Then you can punch home the areas we?re weak in with this new deal for cities.?
Callaghan downplayed Sudbury?s ranking in the report, given it was the only Northern Ontario city in the survey.
What?s more important is Sudbury is on the list, and on the federal radar.
?Up here, it just never measures up. You always look funny on the graph.?
It would have been very easy to dodge the bullet on this one, he said at Thursday?s council meeting.
?I?m proud we got involved in this.
It all comes down to money, he said. The data in the report should be used to press for this ?new deal for cities? that seems to be the new buzzword on Parliament Hill.
?We have to learn what position we?re in to be a part of the new deal. There needs to be a change in attitude with regard to money. The current
system of using property taxes to fund an ever-increasing, broader range of services is not sustainable.?
Municipalities have seen the portion of their budgets provided by grants from senior levels of government shrink from 25.1 per cent in 1998 to four
per cent this year. They see only six cents of every tax dollar collected.
