What The Shulman Report is for

Who writes it

The Shulman Report is written by Ron Shulman. I'm a retired business professor and strategy consultant. For more than thirty years I worked alongside some of the largest companies in the world on process improvement — the unglamorous, essential work of understanding how big organizations actually make decisions, spend money, and get things done. It taught me to read past what an organization says about itself and look instead at how the money moves and where the process breaks. That's the same lens I bring to local government here.

I got involved because of what I was seeing — and being told — as someone who lives and pays taxes here. A water plant first floated at about $60 million, now $270 million. A wastewater project approved at $35 million, now past $50 million. A village sitting right beside a regional water system it can't connect to, its residents quoted $159,000 a house — more than ten times what that hookup costs almost anywhere else. A treatment plant already running at capacity that, when the rains came, sent nearly three Olympic swimming pools of raw sewage straight into our harbour. And through all of it, the same reassurance: it's not a problem, we have it managed. Trust me, they don't. That's why this Report exists.

What began as an attempt to teach has taught me at least as much. I started writing because I hoped that if I laid out what I was learning, plainly, my neighbours might weigh their choices more carefully — not least at the ballot box. But education runs both ways. Along the way I've been lucky enough to fall in with a handful of people — sharp, deeply experienced, thoughtful, and every bit as committed to this community as I am — who have pushed, corrected, and sharpened my thinking. They'd be mortified to be named, so I won't. But a great deal of what appears here has been shaped by their perspective, and the Report is far better for it.

What I came to see

What has become clear to me — and I hope to my readers — is that the way we manage our water and wastewater systems is financially unsustainable.

Put plainly: towns of this size — roughly twelve to twenty-five thousand people — cannot build, run, and above all pay for infrastructure that now costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The tax implications are overwhelming. And as those numbers climbed, it became just as clear that neither The Blue Mountains nor Collingwood was being straight with residents about how these enormous projects were actually going to be paid for.

What troubled me most was the other side of the ledger: the environmental cost of doing nothing — raw sewage in the bay, plants running past capacity — was mounting fast. And through all of it, our politicians seemed content. All was well.

That malaise isn't local to us. It has spread to every level of government, and it's fair to say most of us are frustrated: service that's slow when it should be fast, costs that climb when they should fall, and too often an inability to deliver even the basic things we already pay for. Many of us are simply fed up.

And then, once in a while, something cuts through. Instead of being asked to clean up the mess after we're inundated, we're offered a solution that gets ahead of the problem before it overwhelms us. That is rare in public life.

That is what's on the table now. Working under the direction of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, the Honourable Rob Flack, our MPP Brian Saunderson has advanced exactly that kind of solution: a Municipal Services Corporation — an MSC. For the first time in a long while, it felt like a line thrown to us.

What is an MSC

Most of us already live with utilities and never think about it. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant; you buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires, and you pay for what you use. Gas works the same way. Water can too.

A Municipal Services Corporation is exactly that: a regional water and wastewater utility, publicly owned — its shares held by the member towns themselves, not by any outside investor. It owns the expensive, invisible spine of the system — the treatment plant and the trunk mains — and runs it the way a utility runs things: one regional plan, career professionals who deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget, and the ability to borrow at lower rates and over longer terms than any single small town ever could.

It is not a merger of towns. Your council, your name, your main street, the pipes under your street and the bill you receive — all of that stays exactly where it is. What changes is only the part no town this size can afford to do well alone: owning and operating the plant and the trunk system, under one professional operator, at one open price.

And it is not an experiment. It is how Ontario already runs its electricity and its gas, and how Union Water in the southwest, the Frontenac corporation near Kingston, and Edmonton's EPCOR already run their water — and the model Peel is now adopting. Think regionally, manage locally, govern professionally.

What this project is

But a rescue you're handed is not the same as a rescue you can use. The MSC arrived as a concept without bones — a shape, not yet a working machine. And the one precedent everyone points to, Peel, is doing almost the reverse of what we need: prying a water system out of an integrated regional government, where our task is to build one carefully among towns that are, and want to remain, independent. So the real work — the work of this project — is to put the bones inside the concept: to design a structure that ties the operating platform, the finances, the governance, and the management into a single package that can actually function in this region.

The paper

That work has produced a paper. Over these past months, the handful of people I mentioned — and a few more — set out to turn the MSC into something a council could actually vote on and a lender could actually finance. The result is a paper: The South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation — A Template for the Management of Regional Water and Wastewater in Ontario. It comes in two parts and six chapters.

The finished paper is due by mid-September, and we intend to place it directly in the hands of the MPP who made the tool possible, Brian Saunderson. Read it, check our arithmetic, and hold us to it.

Get in touch

For story ideas, corrections, or anything else, email rfshulman@gmail.com.