Budget shows city not walking the walk

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/12/2024 (259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is sometimes shocking to see what in Winnipeg gets funding and what doesn’t, and how disconnected those decisions seem to be to the city’s needs.

Last week, this paper reported that the City of Winnipeg is pulling its funding from Community Connections, a space in Winnipeg’s Millennium Library serving the city’s homeless.

The space, which costs about $614,000 a year to run, employed 4.2 full-time equivalent staff, a librarian, a pair of community safety hosts and three part-time library assistants. The community safety hosts were trained in security and trauma crisis work. Community Connections handled more than 24,000 information requests between October 2023 to September this year. That’s almost as many as all of the other Millennium service desks combined (29,701).

Those employees’ contracts will not be renewed.

What is getting more money in the budget, however, is the Winnipeg Police Service, which critics say is already overaccounted for in the city’s budget. The preliminary 2025 budget will provide the WPS with 36 more general patrol officers, and two new patrol cars. It’s only half the number of new officers the WPS requested.

The police say they need the extra officers to handle a growing number of calls for service and a growing population. That may well be, but that pill would go down easier if there was more confidence the WPS knew how to handle all the money it receives.

Instead, this paper reported recently that the service’s robot dog, which cost $257,000, mostly sits in its kennel. Its armoured vehicle is put to use weekly, according to WPS officials but exactly how and why is unclear, or at least not clear enough to make the case for the second armoured vehicle it plans to buy with an influx of provincial funding.

Spending on police is to increase $20 million — many times the total operating costs of Community Connections for a year — in 2025. Public frustrations over what is seen as excessive funding of police, here and elsewhere, continue to grow. Advocates cry out for programming which provides help to marginalized communities and staff skilled in, say, trauma crisis work, to handle the problems of those communities instead of armed officers.

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“It just doesn’t make sense and it goes against everything that the city has said that (it is) committed to,” Manitoba Library Association program co-ordinator Kirsten Wurmann told the Free Press.

Indeed. Politicians at all levels of government have done a good job paying lip service to the need for programming, for transitional housing, for a host of resources which deal with myriad urban crises in a way that helps people out of perilous circumstances. Community Connections was a space which helped to do that — it was the kind of community support the marginalized need, arguably fighting crimes of desperation from the ground up. Next year, it will be gone.

Some members of council have cited risks to library patron safety as a reason to close the space. It’s a strange claim. The people who are turning to Community Connections do not vanish into the ether once they leave the library — they will remain in downtown Winnipeg, on the streets, or in other neighbourhoods, needing all the same things they currently need.

Trying to nudge them out of the space by shutting down a resource they turned to will only exacerbate the problem by shutting down one more port to which they might have sailed in a storm.

Some city officials might talk the talk when it comes to curing what ails Winnipeg. But numbers don’t lie, and based on its budget priorities, it sure doesn’t seem to walk the walk.