Revenue: Part 1

The City of Winnipeg is facing a financial crisis. We have constant overruns of massive city projects, and significant mismanagement of city funds in general. Those are major problems in and of themselves, but the good news is that they can be fixed. With better oversight and improved tendering processes, we can rein in overruns, and by introducing transparency and accountability to City Hall, we can ensure that our tax dollars are being used to their full potential. However, those minor changes alone will not be enough to ensure the fiscal stability of the city.

We have a roughly $7 billion infrastructure deficit, which is growing with each passing day. The systems that deliver the very fundamentals of urban life are crumbling beneath us. Our roads, bridges, sewers and water-mains have been neglected for decades, and that neglect has been revealed to us with every deep-freeze, heavy rain, and massive, car-swallowing sinkhole. We need to accept the reality that years of prioritizing vanity projects and civic luxuries has come at the expense of upgrading and maintaining our vital infrastructure. Without losing sight of the vision and promise of what Winnipeg can be, when faced with any question of funding such projects, my first question will always be: what else could we do with this money? As a city, our first funding priority for the foreseeable future needs to be fixing what we already have before we build new luxuries.

Even trimming the fat of megaproject pork will only get us so far, though. First, the city needs to be more assertive in its dealings with both the provincial and federal governments to help meet our infrastructure shortfall. I believe that the City of Winnipeg should lobby the provincial government to earmark half of the recent PST increase to be allocated to the city for infrastructure renewal. This would contribute an additional $275 million annually to the city coffers. That money would play a significant role in repairing our roads and other infrastructure.

When all is said and done, though, we need to address the ability of the city to raise adequate revenues to cover its own needs. We need to have a conversation about taxes. We've all heard a lot of different plans and ideas during this election campaign, and in my next post, I will reveal my plan for an updated taxation system for the City of Winnipeg.