First increase after more than a decade of cuts to OMPF

Heather Wright/The Independent

Brooke-Alvinston officials are scratching their heads after almost every Lambton municipality received an increase in the main grant they receive from the province.

The provincial government is increasing the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund (OMPF) by $100 million over two years, bringing the total funding to $600 million by 2026. Officials say 390 of the 444 municipalities receive funding.

In Lambton, most municipalities will receive between 10 and 16 per cent more in the annual grant in 2025 according to figures released by the provincial government Friday.

Oil Springs, which received $180,000 last year, saw the biggest percentage increase – 36.5 per cent or another $65,700.

Lambton Shores also saw a substantial 16.8 per cent increase in funding.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that some of the small rural municipalities have seen the OMPF grant rise.

But Brooke-Alvinston will receive exactly the same amount as it did this year, $397,700. That has Mayor Dave Ferguson puzzled.

“It’s very disappointing that our numbers stayed the same. Everybody else had gone up. I don’t understand the formula (the province uses to determine the grant.) It’s very convoluted,” he tells The Independent.

While the municipality’s grant didn’t increase, it might be considered a small win. Since 2014, the province has been hacking away at the cash it provides to municipal governments, particularly those in rural areas. Brooke-Alvinston’s Treasurer, Stephen Ikert calculates over the past 11 years, the municipality has lost a cumulative total of $9,959,200.

In 2013, the then-Liberal government reorganized the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund. The province said the reorganization would mean municipalities of similar size would get similar provincial funding.

It was also supposed to help deal with the “challenges faced by northern and rural communities; and those with limited property assessment as well as to assist municipalities with social program costs and rural communities with high policing costs,” according to the Ministry of Finance grant design analysis in 2013.

It added the new structure would ensure “simplicity, transparency, and accountability” and be flexible to individual municipalities needs.

At the time, the province also agreed to fully fund services which counties and municipal governments were responsible for including social assistance programs. Those services at the time cost $1.7 billion.

With that uploading, as politicians called it, the province and municipal representatives agreed to cut the support given through OMPF from $575 million to $500 in three years.

Before the cuts began, Brooke-Alvinston received $1,629,300 in provincial funding a year. In 2024, the municipality received less than a quarter of that.

In 2012, the provincial grant accounted for almost half of the municipality’s revenue. In 2024, it’s only nine per cent of its revenue.

Mayor Ferguson said during a recent regional municipal conference, several provincial officials hinted at more provincial funding coming their way, in part through OMPF.

“We didn’t see anything. We saw more costs,” Ferguson says.

Inflation, of course, has risen dramatically over the last four years. According to the Bank of Canada, inflation from 2014 – when the funding cuts started – inflation is up 31.5 per cent. But municipalities have also seen cost rise in a number of areas including wages, insurance, policing costs (which they have no control over) and fuel costs.

If the OMPF fund had grown with the rate of inflation over the past decade, municipalities would have been sharing $738,959,491.

When the Conservative Party was elected in 2018, it promised rural municipalities the OMPF grant would start to climb. It didn’t.

In Brooke-Alvinston for example, under the Liberal government from 2014 to 2018, the municipality lost half of its grant. From 2018 to 2024, the province cut the OMPF grant by another 54 per cent – from $877,600 to $397,700 today.

After years of the funding remaining around $500 million, the province announced Friday it is investing $550 million this year, $25 million less than Ontario provided in 2014 when the cuts began.

In a news release, the province says it plans to increase that to $600 million in 2026.

That doesn’t mean rural municipalities will suddenly see massive increases in funding. The OMPF grant now rewards growth in urban centres. Municipalities like St. Clair Township – one of the fastest growing municipalities in Lambton – has received about 25 per cent more than it did in 2014.

In the larger urban centers, the difference is more obvious. Sarnia’s funding under the program has gone up 66 per cent since 2014.

And while the original intent was to province similar sized municipalities with similar provincial funding, that doesn’t appear to happen either.

Enniskillen, for example, with a population of 3,085, receives $335,000, $108.59 per person while Brooke-Alvinston, population 2,359, receives $397,700 – $168.59 per person. Oil Springs with just 647 residents, receives $245,700 or $379.75 per person.

And regionally, the disparity is even greater. Lambton County municipalities, with a total population of 128,154, will receive a total of $10,597,700 in 2025 or $82.69 per person.

Chatham-Kent – population 108,689 – receives $21,545,200 or $198.23 per person.

Brooke-Alvinston’s mayor says the province is far off its original goal of providing a simple, transparent funding formula.

“The formula is very convoluted and how they arrive at things. So I, I don’t know what to say, because we’ve stayed steady. We have massive cost to our arena coming up,” Ferguson says.

“And the OMPF has gone up for everybody in the area, except for us.”