With cuts to library services being made by the County of Simcoe, more than 1,000 Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library visitors who access multilingual services and information technology services could be impacted each month.
Following a review, the county reduced its annual budget for libraries by removing all budgets for physical collections and eliminating five library positions at the county level. This will reduce the allocated funding for the new system to $200,000 for the platform and the services for all the libraries that join the new system.
“This has been a long process. Coun. Jonathan Scott and I have been standing on top of our chairs, waving, since April because this isn’t right,” said Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library board chair Jennifer Harrison. “The library board is dismayed by the lack of transparency when making this decision and that our library, in particular, was minimally consulted.
"We recently met with the county, and it was made clear that $200,000 is unlikely to grow year over year despite the demands. Bradford West Gwillimbury is the largest urban centre and is the most diverse municipality and fastest-growing town in the county. We feel that BWG will feel the brunt of the county cuts and will either risk services or face increased costs at the local level.”
To bring attention to the disproportional impact the library will feel, the town’s Anti-Racism Advisory Committee passed a motion earlier this week.
The motion states, “Simcoe County has cut its library budget from roughly $800,000 to $200,000. These cuts eliminate physical, and risk digital multilingual services provided to county-area public libraries. The Simcoe County Immigration Partnership relied on its close collaboration with the Simcoe Library Co-operative, which Simcoe County has now disbanded.
“Bradford West Gwillimbury is the most diverse, the fastest-growing and the largest library system in Simcoe County, with over 1,000 residents regularly accessing the potentially impacted services, the vast majority of whom are racialized and/or new immigrants. Despite the county’s assurances that these cuts are ‘modernization,’ these cuts actually risk harming ongoing work by the Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library board to foster equity, diversity and inclusion.”
As a result, the town’s Anti-Racism Advisory Committee recommend council authorize the following: that “the chair of the Anti-Racism Committee write a letter to Simcoe County councillors sharing the committee’s concerns with these cuts; that such a letter express the imperative that Simcoe County in future ensure decisions like this are done through collaborative and transparent processes, including race-based analysis of potential impacts; and that Simcoe County council be urged to consider providing a per capita funding transfer in lieu of BWG Library joining their new Information Library System (ILS), given the unique circumstances that make joining that ILS disadvantageous for Bradford West Gwillimbury.”
The county informed each municipality and library board in June of the ILS as it transitions away from the Simcoe County Library Co-operative. Of the 11 library boards that make up the co-op, only Bradford West Gwillimbury and Innisfil had not confirmed if they would be partnering with the county.
“County staff keep insisting this is a ‘modernization.’ Well, this ain’t our first rodeo. We know ‘modernization’ is the go-to euphemism for ‘cuts,’” said Scott, who sits on both the library board and Anti-Racism Advisory Committee. “And there’s nothing at all modern about making cuts that disproportionately impact racialized residents.”
The Anti-Racism Advisory Committee entered the discussion to point out how these cuts are disproportionately hitting Bradford.
“The impact to racalized people in Bradford is what we’re most worried about as a result of the cuts,” Scott explained. “Bradford is the most diverse community in the county and it’s the largest library system. A lot of what we do (is to) support new immigrants and racialized people to foster equity and inclusion, and a lot of that is through multilingual services. We’ve worked really hard over the last five to 10 years to expand our multilingual selection, but we’ve used the county’s previous multilingual collections that are now either cut entirely or in jeopardy.”
“They’ve cut the rotation collection,” added Harrison. “The county cut the collection that was curated by their five librarians. The county is saying they’re giving the collection to the libraries, but that collection will be dead within two years — there’s nobody curating it. In terms of the multilingual collections, there were 30 different languages represented. This was a collection that won a Minister’s Award in 2019. In 2019, Simcoe County was bragging and putting out press releases about how great this collection is. Now, under the title of ‘modernization,’ they’re eliminating that collection. Bradford has the highest immigrant rate in the county, and those are the people who are going to be affected by this.”
The lack of consideration for race-based analysis is a sticking point for the Anti-Racism Advisory Committee, which hopes, going forward, no decisions are made by the county without considering the effects on racialized people.
“It’s also an indictment of the county’s decision making. They don’t appear to have ever considered any sort of race-based analysis like you would typically see in 2022 when a government is making a decision,” said Scott. “They almost seem more peeved we’re pointing out this will hurt racialized people than they seem concerned with helping solve the problem they’ve created.”
The library board and the Anti-Racism Advisory Committee don’t believe there’s bigoted intent with the decision, but with who the situation is affecting, they feel there’s a misunderstanding and disconnect on who this will specifically affect.
“When you disproportionately impact racialized library patrons and you’re disproportionately impacting your most diverse town, we have to be clear that’s a form of, at best, unconscious bias. Because they didn’t consider the obvious racialized impacts, the decision has an inherent racist consequence. That’s not me using harsh rhetoric; it’s disproportionately impacting diverse communities.”
With the new ILS, it’s not clear what will be covered because the county has not yet hired a project manager, who will be in charge of the transition.
“They’re hiring an IT project manager, who is not a librarian, so we’re waiting to see what that person will do in terms of moving the project forward,” said Harrison. “We ultimately don’t know what services are going to be included in the $200,000 a year. We still have a lot of questions. Our library board is disappointed in this decision.”
