As far as safety goes, the real danger in Winnipeg's budget is a financial trapeze act without a net

When Scott Gillingham sat down to talk about Winnipeg's new budget, the mayor appeared to imply the city plans to use its largest property tax increase in decades to hire more police and community safety officers.

"First and foremost, this budget invests in public safety," Gillingham said on Wednesday as he unveiled the city's $1.4-billion spending plan for 2025.

"These investments aren't just about responding to emergencies. They're about preparing and giving people the confidence that help will be available when they need it."

Acting police chief Art Stannard applauded, as you would expect a police chief to do. Kate Kehler of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg questioned the decision, as you would expect a policy expert in the social-advocacy sphere to do.

Yet when you look at how the city plans to actually spend the proceeds of a 5.95 per cent property tax hike in 2025, public safety is not the top priority.

It would be fair to ask whether the mayor is trying to use public safety to sell a property tax hike he's been telegraphing for months as a bare necessity for a cash-strapped city.

To the mayor's credit, the city budget is transparent about where Winnipeg plans to spend the proceeds of the proposed tax hike. The money that will be raised from 3.5 percentage points of the 2025 hike — about $35 million — will be spent on road repairs and unspecified city operations. This represents no change from 3.5 per cent hikes in 2023 and 2024.

Of more interest is where the cash raised from the remaining 2.45 percentage points of the 2025 hike will go. This cash amounts to nearly $18 million — and policing is not getting the largest piece of the pie.

One of the top two beneficiaries of this portion of the tax hike is the snow clearing budget. It's slated to rise by $5 million next year and the tax hike accounts for $4 million of that rise.

Another $4 million from this portion of the tax hike will be funnelled over to Winnipeg Transit to cover part of an expected shortfall in revenue.

The third priority for this property tax top-up is the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service. It will receive an additional $3 million to pay for increased Workers Compensation Board charges.

The Winnipeg Police Service ranks No. 4 on the priority list. It's getting $1.9 million to reduce the practice of "expenditure management," which is a bureaucratic euphemism for the squishy budgetary practice of trying to keep a handle on escalating costs.

Another $630,000 will be used to hire more police next year, while $750,000 will be used to hire eight new community safety officers, which are not members of the police service but function as peace officers, both on and off Winnipeg Transit.

Most of the new police officers and about half the community safety officers Gillingham spoke about on Wednesday are slated to be hired in 2026 and 2027. At the risk of pointing out the blindingly obvious, those are future budget years.

Gillingham acknowledged as much on Wednesday when he conceded the bulk of the new, higher-than-usual portion of the property tax hike will be spent on priorities other than policing in 2025.

"There's some of that," he said, while nonetheless insisting the additional revenue the city will collect next year will serve as a core portion of property tax proceeds in 2026 and beyond.

"That property tax increase does pay for officers through future years." 

Prior to budget day, Gillingham spent months warning Winnipeg is running out of money to keep funding all of its operations and suggested a property tax hike of more than 3.5 per cent is needed to stave off financial ruin.

For example, the city will soon drain what little remains of its financial stabilization reserve, a rainy day fund that's supposed to be maintained at six per cent of total city spending on operations in any given year.

It's up to city finance officials to figure out ways to replenish this fund, which the 2025 budget seems to deride as masking "deeper structural issues in budgeting, such as recurring over-expenditures in key departments" including the fire-paramedic service, public works and the police service.

Fixing the structural issues related to snow clearing, fire-paramedic overtime and policing sounds logical. But so does a sense of urgency surrounding replenishing a rainy day fund that ought to stand at $85 million but will soon have a balance of zero.

To be clear, bankruptcy is not a risk for Winnipeg. The city's strong credit rating demonstrates it's nothing like the Detroit of decades past.

But the rhetoric on budget day did not seem to be as urgent as it was during the weeks leading up to it. The 2025 budget includes few obvious service cuts, aside from a plan to see whether it's possible to clear residential streets of snow less often over the winter of 2025-26.

That move alone could haunt Gillingham in the 2026 election year, as Winnipeggers are bound to blame the mayor for the state of the city's streets even if snow-clearing operations are not affected by next winter's pilot project.

So could an effort to sell the coming property tax hike as a public safety measure when the reality is the city is so short of money, it's entering a new year without a financial safety net.

If the city is hit by a disaster on the scale of another pandemic or a major recession — not to mention $84 million worth of more mundane financial risks identified in the budget — even a tax hike far greater than six per cent may not be sufficient to stave off service cuts.