Governments are bracing for a spending crunch of epic proportions in the coming year, as Canada, Ontario, and local municipalities struggle to deal with the fallout from the recent recession and the economic stimulus spending that helped people recover from it.
The taps have been turned off, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has told municipal leaders through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The seemingly unstoppable flow of federal and provincial grant money that's locally helped pay for everything from special project staff to road repairs will, actually, stop.
Not only that, but there will be cutbacks.
Only a politician looking for re-election would try to get people to believe billions of deficit could be erased through economic growth and a little unspecified "belt-tightening."
The last time a federal government tried to change deficit spending to surplus budgeting, we were hit with a host of spending cutbacks. The last time Ontario tried it, we got "rationalization" and "downloading."
But even now, government doesn't pay for a lot of supposed essentials: much of what goes into our day-to-day quality of life comes from volunteers and from donations.
The province complains about the burden of health care spending. But consider how much money it would have to pay, or how many services it would have to cut, without the huge contribution of volunteers and the money volunteers help raise through fundraising campaigns to buy equipment and help build hospitals.
Imagine how much more money the local food bank would need if it had to pay all the people who now help out there - or how much the county's social services department would have to pay to stock and run a similar food bank without community or business or service club donations, without the volunteers who run events to raise those donations.
A society without volunteers, community donations, and fundraising would be vastly different - and much more costly to taxpayers.
Now, we have institutionalized volunteering, with young people indoctrinated early on in the need to "give back" through community service hours required to graduate from high school. Some, of course, do only their minimum 40 hours, but others get involved more and more with projects and services they enjoy, in effect creating secondary, unpaid careers for themselves.
We're going to need all that.
How long is it going to be before the government cash crunch downloads more and more services onto the community, and volunteers?
Forty years ago, parents would have been shocked to be asked to donate money to buy playground equipment for their children's school, or to give more than a token amount for a class trip. Now, parent groups raising money and parents volunteering in schools - are necessary parts of the education system. School boards just can't afford to pay for extra help in schools, for playground equipment, for tree-plantings in playgrounds.
We're seeing the beginning of the trend municipally with Centre Wellington's "partnerships" that draw on community groups and service clubs to do things that even 20 years ago would have been funded completely by tax dollars.
It may not be long before expanding libraries, building community centres, or maintaining parks, perhaps, are shifted to community volunteers or fundraising, as municipalities look to cut more and more expenses.