First, the good news: When Premier Doug Ford announced on Monday that he was backing down — a bit, but an important bit: in his latest fight with municipalities over service funding cuts, those services got another year of life. We’re talking about child care, and paramedic and ambulance services, and most controversially public health programs like vaccination, school nutrition, and infectious disease control.

The proposed cuts were not just immediate, but retroactive. They were deep and applied to this year’s budget, already approved months ago with the expected money being spent. You could tell how ugly it was going to be by the united front that formed up against it: if ultra-conservative Stephen Holyday and leftist champion Gord Perks agree something is stupid and unworkable, then you know the problems with it transcend ideology or political interest. This was going to be an absolute clown show most likely resulting in both chaos and tragedy. But now, we won’t see that this year. That is actually good news. Full stop.

Now, the bad news. The war ain’t over. This is but a temporary ceasefire. What’s more, we know when the fighting will resume, and the battle may be harder next time.

Everyone involved in this thing needed time. Those expected to slash spending and deal with the consequences will mostly want to avoid doing so, but the immediate crisis was trying to do it on the fly without any chance to plan or figure things out. They get some time. (As the premier put it in announcing his change, “more runway.”)

Ford and his fellow conservatives desperately needed a breather too. Public opinion was absolutely tanking on them. Maybe that would be OK, with a provincial election years away. But there’s a federal election this year, and with Justin Trudeau driving his own party’s bus into a wall these past few months, Ford has seemed determined to help his own Conservative federal cousins into office — even spending taxpayer money and coercive authority in a campaign to draft small business owners across the province into helping make Andrew Scheer prime minster (with his compulsory anti-Trudeau carbon tax gas pump stickers). Weird in that context to go out of your way to make everything Conservative toxic. Maybe next year.

Strike that: certainly next year. Ford announced he’d maintain funding this year, but was insistent that his people would “work with” cities to find the savings that would allow the cuts next year and in the future to go forward.

In Toronto’s 2020 budget season, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, when you combine the cuts that just got delayed a year with other cuts including rolled-back gas tax revenue. Figuring out how to deal with that — even with a year of “runway” to check the oil and brakes and rev the engine — may actually be harder than the job council just finished. The retroactive cuts to a budget the city had already passed was so transparently catastrophic that council’s various factions could only draw the same conclusion: we cannot do it.

But cuts in the future present a different proposition: Mayor John Tory, in his appeals to the province in the past week, had specifically said he’d work with the province to find savings in the future if they would just cancel the retroactive 2019 ones. That approach was already drawing flak from council’s left, who want to make the case that cuts themselves, whatever their timing, are wrong-headed and dangerous. You see exactly this dynamic playing out in the immediate reactions to the provincial retreat. Conservative Councillor Michael Thompson was saying, “The provincial government has heard our calls to come to the table and protect what matters most to our residents. When we stand together we are stronger — I welcome the premier’s announcement and look forward to working together.” Meanwhile public health chair and leftist Councillor Joe Cressy was saying, “our work isn’t over — we must all continue to stand up and speak out to ensure future cuts to our vital public health and child care services do not proceed.”

You can see the familiar dynamic: one group looking forward to working together with the premier to implement cuts more slowly, one group beginning the next wave of resistance against the premier’s plans.

Monday’s announcement is, in the immediate term, good news. In public policy terms, it means needed services are preserved for now. In political terms it means everyone involved lives to fight another day. But make no mistake: they will fight another day. Less than a year from now. And that battle early next year could be even messier and harder than this one that just finished.

Edward Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/05/27/doug-fords-reversal-on-city-cuts-is-just-a-brief-ceasefire-before-the-war-resumes.html