When all the costs aren’t part of the menu

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2025 (233 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Imagine that you’re at a fancy restaurant with your partner.

It’s pricey, sure, but you’ve been there before and the food was good. And it’s a special occasion — there’s enough room in the budget to splurge a little.

You get there on time and get to your table. When you do, you notice the menu’s changed a bit. All of the main courses are more expensive. Not a lot more, but enough — the strip loin you had last time is now at least a couple of dollars more than you remember. You and your partner lock eyes above the menus, and you realize you’ve known each other long enough to share the secret language of love and long-term relationships: let’s skip the appetizers.

Forty dollars for each main course is going to take a bite out of budget, but OK. It’s a once-in-a-while thing, and you can make it work.

But then your server comes to take your order, and things take a turn. You’ve ordered your main course, and then the server explains the price for the strip loin — and for your partner’s chicken cordon bleu — is only for the meat. Your side dishes are extra: seven dollars for the butter-roasted green beans, the same for garlic mashed potatoes. The price tag’s going up, but you’re in it now.

So you order, but you do feel a little bit ripped off by the process. The food is reasonable enough, but not, you both agree, at that price.

Then the bill comes, and it’s quite a bit more than you were originally expecting. You’ve been charged a new cutlery fee for your knife and fork, a plate-scraping levy, and a composting fee for your meagre leftover food scraps — even though you ate everything and there was little more than a skim of vagrant mashed potato left on your plate.

Getting in the car, you share another wordless message with your love — not pleased with that at all.

Welcome to Winnipeg. Not any restaurant in Winnipeg, of course. But the City of Winnipeg.

Back in January, things were bad enough: municipal taxpayers were told that their property taxes were going to rise by 5.95 per cent, the largest Winnipeg municipal tax increase since the 1990s, and an increase of $121 a year for the owner of a basic single-family home. Many Winnipeggers probably did the math at that point and thought, “It’s going to be tough, but we can do it if we cut somewhere else.”

But that was before the side dishes came along.

Garbage fees? Rising from $93 to $254 for 2025 (of which the city will collect $190.50 this year because the new fee would be set to start in April, not January). Then, a proposed sewer rate hike this year for that mythical single family home of $224 this year, followed by a series of regular increases on into 2027 that would end up cumulatively raising the sewer rate on that average home by $1,000 over last year’s rate.

Mayor Scott Gillingham says the sewer rate is too high and “We cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”

OK, but it’s still the method on the books right now to deal with the absolutely massive cost overruns on the North End Sewage Treatment Plant, which has now crested $3 billion. Pretty astounding for a project that was budgeted to cost $797 million in 2017.

Isn’t there somewhere a waste diversion fee for an organics composting program that won’t actually come to homeowners until 2030? It’s baffling.

What’s missing in all this? Clarity and honesty. Telling taxpayers how much costs are going to increase clearly and directly at the start of the year, not in dribs and drabs.

Then they can make a clear and direct decision about voting.