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Posted May 31, 2023, 6:40 PM
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Unregistered User
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Join Date: Oct 2012
Location: Saskatoon
Posts: 522
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Food for thought from the Winnipeg thread:
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Originally Posted by Winnipegger
Everyone in this city is squabbling over scraps. Yes, Police and Fire (and their salaries) take up a massive portion of the City's budget which leaves little room for anything else. But guess what? It's not that those services have budgets that are necessarily out of line with other Canadian cities when adjusting for population, it's that Winnipeg just brings in such little revenue compared to other cities that proportionally the Police and Fire budgets look massive.
For 2023, Winnipeg's total operating budget is $1.28 Billion, or $1,634 per person (population: 783,096). In comparison, Quebec's total operating budget is $1.77 billion, or $3,175 per person (population: 557,390). So Quebec's operating budget is much higher than Winnipeg's, with a much smaller population, and as a result per-capita expenditures are 94% higher than Winnipeg's.
When looking strictly at Police, Winnipeg's Police budget is $316M, which is $403 per capita, while Quebec's Police budget is $148M, which is $265 per capita, so 32% lower.
So when looking at Quebec, yes they spend less proportionally on Police when adjusting for population, but there is no way around the fact that they tax a lot more in Quebec, likely have a better provision of goods and services to help vulnerable populations, and don't have to deal with the after effects of our collective national legacy of colonialism on Indigenous peoples.
I've said this so many times and I'll repeat it again: Winnipeg as a city is underfunded, and we are left to carry the majority of the national burden that colonialism has inflicted in Indigenous peoples. This is a national tragedy and issue that will not be solved without massive federal assistance that comes from all provinces. As a nation, everyone was complicit in the problems we made for an entire segment of the population and yet Prairie cities, especially Winnipeg and Edmonton, are alone the ones left to pick up the pieces and deal with the issues that remain. Elected officials at a national level need to step up and give special attention to cities like Winnipeg in dealing with this problem. Special funding for non-profits, addictions issues, and providing housing are necessary to fix problems that lead to bloated police budgets.
Until everyone acknowledges this issue, we are going to be continually responding to ever increasing crime and unhoused populations, and the police budget will simply grow - either via adopted budgets or approved overtime at the end of the fiscal year - because one way or another action needs to be taken against these problems. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winnipegger
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words. I guess I just get so frustrated on the state of national discourse when it comes to issues like policing, colonization, and Indigenous reconciliation. So many "progressives" in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa that want to advance "reconciliation" with nice blog posts, fancy PDF documents coming out of think tanks, hiring "diversity and inclusion" coordinators, posting on social media, celebrating [insert progressive initiative] day, etc., but so little tangible action on how to tackle these issues because so many of these thought leaders and policy wonks and progressive pundits are far removed from the every day reality of the poverty, addictions, and crime cycle faced by the Indigenous communities in Prairie cities.
It takes the combined Indigenous population of the Vancouver and Toronto CMA to equate to the number of Indigenous people in Winnipeg (~100,000), yet these CMA's account for 8.8 million people in total. The centres from which all this progressive reconciliation talk come from are detached from the centres where the effects of policy (or lack thereof) are most vividly felt.
And before someone says this isn't related to construction in Winnipeg, it absolutely indirectly is. A significant part of the image of our downtown, and therefore desire to develop and build there, absolutely hinges on the social and economic direction the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to our downtown are heading in. You won't build a vibrant Exchange District, Waterfront Drive, Centennial, South Portage, or Assiniboine-Broadway unless North Point Douglass, Lord Selkirk Park, Spence, Centennial, Dufferin, William Whyte, and Burrows Central are improving. Simply due to geographic proximity, what occurs in those neighborhoods spills over to our downtown, which affects safety, perception, and ultimately market desirability for employers and residents to locate there.
While infrastructure, walkability, architecture, transit, and urban fabric are all important components of downtown's ability to attract investment and people, no single issue will impact downtown's rejuvenation or decline more than the wellbeing of the primarily Indigenous neighborhoods that border our downtown. And many Indigenous people, who have been subject to the effects of colonialism, will be strongly affected by the resources and support provided or not provided to them by their community, municipal, provincial, and federal governments.
So you can make all the master plans you want, and you can redesign streetscapes and add bike lanes, and plant trees, and give out TIFs, and add funnelnators, and build rapid transit lines, but if Indigenous people in inner-city neighborhoods continue to suffer, poverty and crime will follow, which makes downtown feel unsafe, which drives away employers and residents, end of story.
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I work downtown and am always walking around the city centre. It is so disheartening to see the poverty and addictions that have caused so much grief and loss for so many. It also really drives home why there are so many people fed up with "woke culture". Many of these people are right-leaning individuals from working class segments of society. People who see firsthand the poverty and struggle that only seems to be getting worse. And then to hear these putative solutions from lefty intelligentsia that are so disconnected from what's actually going on, I can see why the frustration comes out in destructive ways. This isn't to justify turns to the far right but any means but rather an attempt to understand why people act the way they do rather than just blaming them as "bad people" or irredeemable. People don't know how to respond and may not have the ability to logically analyze the root causes (which represents a failure of education). So they go for the scapegoat of "wokeism" reacting against the lefty intelligentsia - the NDP who increasingly has abandoned working class politics.
I don't want to tread too far from construction, but it really is true that unless these issues that stem from colonial traumas are addressed through better funding at provincial and federal levels, and real on-the-ground anti-poverty measures, Saskatoon will continue to struggle to see development in its core keep up with our more suburban areas.
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