Bruce County council has approved its new Health Care Funding Policy.
The county’s Corporate Services committee had passed a motion back in October 2024 to have funding set at 0.5% of the levy, and directed staff to present a policy back to council.
The new policy would mean that for health care organizations asking for capital funding would no longer go to individual municipalities and then to the county for a funding request, but rather only going to the county.
Director of Corporate Services Sam Dinsmore explained, “This policy also looks to centralize all requests at the county level, rather than health care providers going to all eight lower-tiers and then coming to the county afterwards. In addition, this policy’s looking to build annual funding into the county’s budget equalling 0.5% of the previous year’s tax levy to help fund the health care reserve fund and the health care reserve fund will then be used to help fund the requests that are then approved by council.”
When county staff looked to other upper-tier municipalities in the province, they found that while some wouldn’t hear capital funding requests, others had between 0.5% and 1% of their annual budgets earmarked for such requests.
The policy would still allow lower-tiers to add additional funding for capital projects, and continue to support operating costs such as physician recruitment.
“If a local municipality decided that they thought that they would like to fund something, then the county policy the way that it’s written would exclude ‘county providing additional funding’,” said CAO Christine MacDonald. “What we’re doing is that we’re recognizing it’s the same tax base that we’re operating from… We don’t want to limit any of the abilities or jurisdiction of the local lower-tier councils in what they want to fund, but we do want to streamline that we have one tax base that’s supporting these more expensive commitments of capital.”
The new policy states that only capital purchases will be funded, and the county will not fund ongoing operating expenses.
Dinsmore said, “County staff did speak with the lower-tiers, and we did compile what they had committed in their budgets and had committed to the providers. There’s a large range between each of the lower tiers are handling these requests. So we’ve added that once the county gets to the 0.5% target that’s included in this policy, that funding will encompass all of the requests that the county has seen, that has been made to those local tiers.”
The report outline that the 2025 budget includes a $150,000 transfer to the Health Care reserve fund, which is currently dedicated to the Brightshores Health Services commitment if that transfer is sustained annually, and the original commitment is $500,000 over five years ending in 2028. In order to meet the 0.5% contribution goal, the County would have to increase the transfer by $186,000 which equates to a tax levy increase of 0.27%.
