Travis Kann came all the way down to city hall to accuse Councillor Joe Cressy of spreading misinformation, and then he fled when we asked him to provide any specific evidence to back it up.

Kann, the spokesperson for Minister of Health Christine Elliott, said the provincial government didn’t want to fight this out in the press. Which is weird, since presumably the reason he crashed Cressy’s press conference was so he could tell the press that Cressy was “fear-mongering” by spreading inaccurate “misinformation.”

But repeatedly asked — by Cressy, and by me, and by other reporters from a bunch of media outlets — to specify what exactly, in his estimation, the correct numbers were, he declined. And then walked briskly through a swarm of reporters trying to question him to get away.

What Cressy, who is chair of the city’s public health department, had said at the press conference was pretty straightforward, with lots of specifics. He said the province has told the city it is cutting the funding to Toronto Public Health, effective immediately. Previously it has funded 75 per cent of the city department’s budget. That funding is going down to a 50 per cent share by 2021. Cressy says the immediate cut applying to this year’s budget is $64 million. He says beginning in 2021, it will be down by $102 million per year. $1 billion over 10 years. Mayor John Tory is using the same numbers as he also decries the cuts.

Those are precise numbers, easily verified or debunked when this all comes out in the wash. Cressy says they were provided by the province to city officials. And they seem, on the surface, to align with the gist of what Premier Doug Ford said when he phoned in to a show on Global News Radio 640 on Tuesday and said the province was moving from funding 75 per cent of the department to 50 per cent of the department, which he dismissed as being the “folks who go around and go into restaurants and put the little stickers on saying it’s safe to eat.” The premier contrasted that with “the things that matter to people,” where he’d invest more money.

But Kann, echoing the statements of his boss Christine Elliott, says they have it all wrong. These aren’t cuts at all! They’re merely “modernizing” by implementing a “shift to the cost-sharing funding model.” Kann said the province expects, given how big a priority the city says things like school nutrition programs and vaccinations and preventing epidemics of communicable diseases are, they expect these programs will not be cut at all.

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Now, I gotta say, this spokesperson for the gang that likes to call itself the Government for the People speaks in language that seems to resist being understandable by regular people. But when you wade through it, what he’s saying is that if the city cares so much about this stuff, they’ll pay for it despite the drastic provincial funding cut. And then he expects us to agree that means the province hasn’t made a cut at all.

This is a bit of a theme emerging from the province’s time-bomb budget, in which the headlines were All Booze All the Time but the hangover has been a series of explosions in the funding programs of transit maintenance, legal aid, library services, and a host of other programs. No one in Ford’s government wants to take ownership of the obvious results of the decisions they are making. They don’t want to call cuts cuts, and they want to slough off responsibility for implementing those cuts onto someone else.

Cressy says the cuts, when implemented, amount to $102 million per year. Kann and Elliott had refused, in email exchanges with the Star early Wednesday and at city hall, to offer a specific contrasting number, although they did say the “shift” should be “one-third of a percentage point of the City of Toronto’s annual budget.” Later in the afternoon, Kann confirmed to the Star that the province figures the cut will be $42 million per year when fully phased in. That’s still a lot of money for the city. You could also point out that number is less than one-third of one-tenth of one per cent of the province’s budget. Which seems like a rounding error.

Whichever figures turn out to be right, the province is “shifting the cost-sharing funding model” in a way that means the city gets tens of millions of dollars per year less for these programs, and then insisting they haven’t cut the programs.

Obviously, in response, the city can cut programs and take the blame for it, or they can slash something else to shift the funding over and take the blame for that, or they can raise property taxes about by 1.5 to 4 per cent and take the blame for that.

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Now, if push comes to shove, should the city do that? Three times Joe Cressy was asked if he thought the city should cover the gap, and three times he refused to answer, insisting the province should “do the right thing” and reverse the cut. I think, if the province doesn’t, the city should make up the difference, and raise the money through taxes if it needs to. I don’t think Cressy and the mayor and medical officer of health are exaggerating when they say public health spending saves lives. Even those stickers — actually posters, really — Ford scoffs at represent inspections of restaurant kitchens to prevent food poisoning, which I wouldn’t think is a frivolous waste of government resources.

But if that happens, Ford and Elliott shoulder all the blame for forcing that on the city in an act of political cowardice. If they don’t have the heart to keep funding these programs, they could at least show the courage to own up to it.

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