There’s been a lot of talk during this year’s budget confirmation process about cost; the cold hard numbers that decide what is affordable and what is not, what is an extravagance and what is a necessity. Trying to figure which is which is easier said than done, and that’s always been the problem with government budgets, everyone agrees they should be lower, but no one agrees how.
One person at this week’s budget delegation night meeting of council cracked open a golden oldie when it comes to talking about governments and budgets: You see, when you sit down at your kitchen table to figure out the bills, you have to work with what you have.
This is, of course, a logical fallacy because a government budget is nothing like a household budget. Government budgeting is like electing one house to figure out the budget for all the other houses on the street, and after everyone’s mortgage, electric bill and groceries are paid, you have just enough money left over to do three things on a list of 100 discretionary items, and everyone in the neighbourhood wants theirs.
At the heart of taxation is this idea that one dollar collected from everyone can be spent more impactfully for a common community good rather than everyone spending that dollar on whatever they want. But I worry that we’ve all lost the thread on what is collective good. In the attempt to create an immediate impact on affordability, we’re compounding the effect from years of underfunding and deferring.
Does that make sense to anyone else?
We saw that this week with the federal government announcing a HST vacation on select items for two months. We also saw that a few weeks ago when the provincial government announced that they were spending $3 billion to send everyone a $200 cheque in January. Really? Is there no common good that Queen’s Park could spend $3 billion on?
There’s also the fact that all of this is happening in the midst of the recent eviction of people from St. George’s Square, and if it wasn’t bad enough that people with nowhere else to go were told that this was another place they couldn’t go, there was a lot of celebrating via letters to the editor in this publication, which was in extremely bad taste if not blatantly rubbing salt in the wound.
I took part in a vigil in St. George’s Square on Monday to honour half-a-dozen people who died from drug poisoning in the days before the eviction, and it was a genuinely moving experience. Speaking of cold numbers, we often see these deaths as statistics, but there’s a human being behind every death, and on Monday they were honoured by 200 other human beings on a cold November night. It’s been hard to shake the sadness of that event.
I think there was another kind of sadness being expressed in much of this week’s council meeting too. A sadness that asks: 'is this the best we can do?'
There were around 30 people who spoke at the meeting, and most of them were advocates for some program that the Strong Mayor budget falls short on supporting in 2025. That included the arts, trails, transit, skateboarding, parks, recreational programs, and Guelph’s bicentennial, but it also included Mayor Cam Guthrie’s decision to direct staff to get to four per cent using Strong Mayor Powers to begin with.
Goodness knows I’ve been railing against that decision since it was announced in February, but I’ve having this weird Devil’s advocate moment where I’m thinking now that I’m kind of grateful it happened. Maybe it’s because of this process we can now look at things clearly and understand what it means when we say budgets are moral documents, they tell us what we value.
What we value in this budget document is housing, the support for housing, policing, social services, and responding to regulatory demands. What we value less is our Community Benefit Agreements, or timelines to complete projects agreed upon through a master planning process, or fighting back when upper levels of government, who already exert outsized authority on cities, impose policies that are either silly or severe.
Urbanist William H. Whyte, observing the shift to suburban living in the mid-20th century, expressed his disappointment with how cities changed as a result of that migration to new built-up areas outside the cities, and who was doing the changing.
“Most of the rebuilding underway is being designed by people who don't like cities. They do not merely dislike the noise and the dirt and the congestion. They dislike the city's variety and concentration, its tension, its hustle and bustle. The results are not cities within cities, but anti-cities.”
I came across this quote while also thinking about another urbanist theory this week, “Guelph-issauga”, a not very friendly term used to describe mostly the new areas of the Royal City that bare more of a resemblance to every other exurb in the GTHA than something uniquely Guelph. Being a resident of the south end now I think “Guelph-issauga” is kind of reductive but that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s something true in it.
You see, this is a “Guelph-issauga” budget.
The cuts and deferrals are all the things that make Guelph feel like a community and not just the place where your bed and TV is. The focus is on growth and the bottomline, which is a 50-year project in Mississauga that transformed it from farm fields to the seventh largest city in the country. But what is the character of that city? What do you think about when you hear someone say “Mississauga”? What do you think about when you hear someone say “Guelph”?
This may be the essential question of this budget cycle, but it doesn’t touch the one thing that everyone is concerned about, which is cost. We have a pretty good idea about what the budget is going to cost this year in terms of dollars and cents, but what about next year’s equally high, originally approved budget increases? What about all the projects being deferred now? How expensive will they be in the years to come?
Before voting on Wednesday, I would remind council that 20 years ago, the new main library project was going to cost $17 million, and then tell us about the cost of the city we want.
