To the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), the fact that the City of Thompson's operating speding rose 13 per cent from 2008 through 2015, while the population only gre two per cent, is a sigfn that the city if spending unsustainably.
From the city’s perspective, looking at only one side of the ledger is a shell game designed to generate public and governmental pressure for municipalities to rein in their spending.
Totally opposite viewpoints, for sure. But the truth is, neither of them is really wrong.
The CFIB, an advocacy group for Canadian small businesses, which claims to have more than 100,000 members, has a vested interest in seeing taxes reduced. The lower they are, the more money their members get to keep for themselves as profits or to reinvest in their businesses. Who among us wouldn’t like to have more money left over to spend as we see fit?
The city, for its part, has responsibilities that it might not otherwise like, foisted upon it by higher levels of government, usually the province, which it has no power to resist. Want to take over a dump, the operation of which will obviously increase your operating costs? No. That’s too bad, you’re getting it anyways. Would you like to build a new sewage treatment plant, your share of which will cost you $12 million that you will be forced to collect from local taxpayers? It doesn’t matter because you have to according to provincial regulations. In addition, it has to contend with the same sort of treatment from Vale, which can offload facilities like the water treatment plant and also has the luxury of reducing the amount of money it pays in lieu of taxes as it pleases.
One thing that both the CFIB and the city can agree on is that, if spending grows faster than the city’s population and the rate of inflation, which it has for the years the CFIB looks at in its Manitoba Municipal Spending Watch report, new money has to come from existing taxpayers. The city doesn’t deny that it has had to increase property taxes, though it has also brought in revenue from elsewhere, including grants from the provincial and federal governments – which get their revenue from taxpayers – or by charging more to dump things at the waste disposal ground than it costs to operate the facility, which is primarily used by, you guessed it, local taxpayers.
The spending watch is a tool that can be used to gauge how fast spending is rising compared to the population and inflation. It is still up to local leaders – and the people who elect them – to decide what services are important and how to pay for them. It is literally a valuable lesson to learn, particularly as we are now in the last seven weeks of the 2018 municipal election campaign.
