Board wants city to take over homemaking program

The programis mainly funded by the province, but the city provides a $65,000 top-up.

A spokesperson with the social services board said it will stop running the program at the end of the year, and transfer it to the city.

"We're anxiously awaiting their progress to assimilating this program into their programming, Terry Flaherty said.

City wants time

It's not clear why the board wants to end its involvement in the homemaking program.

But the citys manager of community services said, if that happens, the city can't pick up the slack.

"We'll need about six months or so to explore with some other agencies in town whether any one of them would be qualified to run this program for us, Greg Alexander said.

The city does not want to shut down the homemaking program, Alexander said. If that were to happen many of the clients would have to be moved into a long-term care facility.

"From our point of the view, the idea would be for the board to just say yes, we should continue to run it, Alexanderadded. "If they cannot or will not run it, [they need] to give us an extension so we [can] figure out how this [will] work."

In the meantime, Flaherty said the board continues to run and administer the homemaking program for "our client base that needs the service."