Few goodies in store for Winnipeggers as mayor signals stark pre-Christmas budget

In a couple of weeks, Mayor Scott Gillingham is expected to present a $1.4-billion spending plan for Winnipeg that will offer a little nothing for everyone.

According to the mayor, the City of Winnipeg is heading into a 2025 budget cycle with few good options when it comes to delivering all the services the city offers, building and maintaining infrastructure and replenishing a rainy-day fund that was depleted during the pandemic.

"It's no secret that Winnipeg, like every other city in the country, is dealing with financial challenges," Gillingham said in October, after his office commissioned a poll floating the political palatability of a series of somewhat fanciful budget-balancing options.

One option was raising property taxes more than the 3.5 per cent annual tax hike promised by the mayor when he ran for office in 2022. Another was substantial service cuts, which is the easiest means of committing political suicide available to a mayor.

A third option listed in the poll was introducing new taxes that could only be imposed with permission from the provincial government. The fourth was wresting more money away from the province, ideally in the form of a share of existing growth taxes such as the PST.

On the surface, it's not unusual to hear doom and gloom emanating from the mayor's office in the weeks before budget day. One way to ensure there's minimal blowback from a mediocre budget is to promise a truly terrible spending plan well in advance before performing a reverse bait-and-switch.

Former Winnipeg mayor Brian Bowman, Gillingham's predecessor and ally, accomplished this feat by parading the prospect of widespread Winnipeg Transit cuts in a draft version of a budget that ended up getting amended into something less awful before city council approved it.

Gillingham, however, is going further. The current mayor appears to be trying to up the ante with Wab Kinew's NDP government, which initially signalled a willingness to cut some form of new funding deal with the city, which is home to more than half Manitoba's population and the vast majority of the NDP's seats.

Every Winnipeg mayor since Stephen Juba, who was first elected in 1956, has attempted to pull off this feat, correctly noting the city has relatively few means of raising revenues of its own.

The most famous proponent of a new deal was Glen Murray, the city's mayor from 1998 to 2004, who succeeded in communicating the benefits of a new funding arrangement but was stymied in his efforts to secure one by former premier Gary Doer.

Kinew, who presents himself as something of a Doer acolyte, appears to be following in his mentor's footsteps. If the Kinew government was ever considering a new deal with the city, that air of co-operation appears to be over.

According to several members of city council, the preliminary version of the 2025 Winnipeg budget has been completed without factoring in substantial funding increases from the province. It's slated to head over to the printer without any semblance of the new deal desired by Gillingham, Murray, Juba and every mayor in between.

The city is now expecting a two per cent provincial funding increase for policing, thanks to a Thursday announcement by Justice Minister Matt Wiebe. But even this last-minute parcel of provincial funding will not keep pace with the increase in city spending on police.

Thanks to mounting overtime bills, Winnipeg is on pace to spend $339 million on policing in 2024, an increase of four per cent over the police budget in 2023.

A two per cent funding hike for 2025 could therefore be seen as a de facto cut. Wiebe did not agree, pointing out his government is now promising to pay for 12 new officers.

That claim could not be corroborated by the mayor's office or the Winnipeg Police Service, which pointed out the officers in question are already being trained and earning salaries en route to their graduation this coming spring.

But this is just minutiae in the grand scheme of a $1.4-billion city budget. That spending plan is now all but guaranteed to be a disappointment in the eyes of anyone expecting something in the way of dramatic or inspiring plans for Winnipeg.

The announcement of new major infrastructure projects on the scale of the Disraeli Freeway reconstruction of 2010 or Southwest Transitway extension of 2014 do not appear to be possible.

As Gillingham said Thursday, the city is already close to its borrowing limit and is currently slated to complete billions of dollars worth of upgrades to the North End Water Pollution Control Centre without the federal and provincial funding commitments the city has long sought.

Replenishing the financial stabilization reserve — the rainy-day fund that's supposed to be maintained at six per cent of total city spending, or about $86 million right now — is also unlikely while the city struggles to hold the line on services the public expects and demands.

No one cares about a rainy-day fund if their back lanes are full of snow, their pools aren't open when their kids want to cool off or their buses aren't running on time.

So what should Winnipeggers expect? A bare-bones budget that largely holds the line on service delivery, restricts infrastructure spending to routine maintenance and exposes the city to financial crisis if disaster strikes.

This is what the mayor is signalling. If the budget turns out to be less grim, consider it another successful effort to paint a terrible picture before presenting a merely mundane one.