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DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I’m in love with my sister’s boyfriend, and neither one of them knows it. They’re both grad students and came back home from the province where they are studying to write and spend the summer in Manitoba.

Thankfully, they’ve gone back home because it was becoming too much for me to bear. My sister’s guy is perfect for me, but she already owns him and I’m too young to fight her for him.

Still, the two of them don’t realize the depth of my feelings. I don’t know how to behave when they get cosy around me and I feel so jealous I want to scream. I’m not sure what to do next.

This week I got an email from my artsy-fartsy sister with an invitation to come visit them in December and go to some fun plays and parties with them and their friends. They even promised my Christmas present from them will be my plane ticket.

The powers that be in Winnipeg have pushed for cheap property taxes for decades. As a result, the city doesn’t have enough money to balance the books, let alone maintain infrastructure, deliver services and respond to challenges like homelessness and the toxic drug crisis.

Winnipeg’s fiscal problem stems from decades of keeping property-tax increases below inflation and relying on inadequate revenues to fund a growing city. The result? Today, Winnipeg spends less money per person on city services than it did in 2001.

A look at the books at city hall is stark. Winnipeg has run a deficit almost every year since the COVID-19 pandemic because of climate-change-driven heavy ice and snowstorms, higher fuel costs and increased policing overtime. During this time, city council tried to cut and freeze public service spending where it could; as a result, community services have been cut to the bone.

Departments responsible for what makes a city a good place to live have been squeezed. Since 1999, community services — responsible for libraries, recreation, swimming lessons and aspects of Winnipeg’s poverty-reduction work — has 149 fewer staff positions, an 18 per cent reduction, even as the city’s population has grown 35 per cent, or by 220,000 people.