Right in the centre - Making the best of what you have

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Published on Friday, November 6, 2015

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

The Winnipeg School Division is asking the province to build three new schools. Considering how long Steinbach and Winkler have waited for new schools, asking for three may be a stretch.

Neepawa is waiting for a new school as well.

Winnipeg’s situation is different. They have a lot of school space, some of which isn’t being used. The artificial class size limits imposed by the province haven’t helped. I know it sounds very out of date but when a classroom gets a bit crowded, it’s very tempting to remind people that at one time, Mountain Road’s one room school had 91 kids attending it. To be a bit less extreme, I know a teacher who had 48 kids in a one room school and a half a dozen didn’t speak English. 

Perhaps not a realistic comparison but one has to ask WSD, have they applied the first rule of business and that is Utilization of Inventory? How many empty classrooms are there in the city, how many empty schools?

If the WSD schools haven’t been kept up any better than many of the Winnipeg community centre arenas, then the WSD may well be in a lot of trouble. Neepawa’s schools, as are most rural schools, are reasonably well kept up. Rural arenas, for the most part, are kept up as well. Neepawa is very fortunate in that the Yellowhead Centre, which is both an arena and a hall, is old but debt-free and still pretty well maintained. It actually makes a small profit some years, but no where near enough to replace the ice plant when it finally quits.

The bigger picture for Manitoba is that the Province of Manitoba is broke, dead-busted broke. They don’t have the money to build new schools, new care homes or new hospitals. They have over run their budgets for years.

So that begs the obvious question, how do you balance the budget and make capital expenditures? That also begs the question, why do you want to balance the budget anyway? The government can always borrow (or print) more money, right?

Let’s answer the second question first. We need to balance the budget so that the debt doesn’t grow any bigger. Deficits are the annual losses, debt is the accumulated losses. Every year we have to pay huge amounts of interest on our debt. God help us if interest rates go up because our interest payments will go up sharply as well. Interest payments don’t increase our level of services or our infrastructure. The bottom line is that debt should at least be controlled and at best avoided.

The first question is how do governments balance the budget and still finance capital items such as schools, care homes and hospitals? 

A first step would be to make sure school divisions are using their available space. Divisions all have available space, it just may not be in the place they want it. Some Winnipeg parents complain bitterly that their students are up to an hour, on the school bus. Many rural students are on for an hour, so suck it up princess. The same could apply to the Neepawa area. There’s room at Eden School but parents seem to be aghast at town kids having to take a bus for a grade or two to go out to Eden for school. Pretty short sighted in both cases.

Another thing the province could do is establish a labour policy where wage increases are limited to inflation. I don’t think there are many people in the public service who are suffering so a cost of living or inflation based wage increase should be good. It’s pretty stupid for the Province of Manitoba to get into endless fights over wages with public service unions. A labour policy where wage increases are limited to inflation could end the endless labour fights. That would save a lot of time and money, unlike Ontario where they paid the teachers’ unions for negotiating costs

Governments should also embrace direct private investment as well as through foundations to build capital structures.

The biggest thing that governments could do is be decent with the people who work in the public service. There’s more to life and the workplace than money. The biggest complaint people have is that governments and their agencies are run in a stupid, bossy, top down fashion. If governments could beat that monkey off their back, governing would go a lot smoother. 

We have relatively new governments at the municipal level, a new one at the federal level and maybe we’ll get a new one at the provincial level next spring. Do you think they can learn how to run our affairs properly?