Right in the centre - At least ask the questions
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- Published on Thursday, September 8, 2016
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
The province of Manitoba is under a lot of pressure. sixteen years of managerial neglect by the NDP has left Manitoba in a funding swamp. The running of the province is one big mess. Education funding is under the microscope and so it should be. The province has expanded school funding at well beyond the rate of inflation, but there is still way more to do.
Let it be said at the outset that our schools, our teachers and administrators are being asked to do way more than they should be asked to do. As cruel as it may sound, it is not the job of the education system to provide food, to run a day care or a health centre. We have imposed way too many duties on our teachers and have been doing so for years.
Personally, I think that peoples’ expectations of the school system has gotten way out of hand. The government can’t fix everything. People have to be prepared to take responsibility for their kids’ well being. I hear horror stories of what some parents put their kids through and it is not up to the province or the school divisions to fix every weak spot in society. People have to take responsibility for their own actions. Kids’ well being should never be sacrificed over booze, drugs, parents’ personal ambitions and egos. Enough said. If parents are looking after their kids, then all is well and good. If parents aren’t, then they should shape up. In Canada, we are not fighting wars, we rarely have to fight epidemics. For the most part, there is enough money for food, for shelter and life necessities. Children should never have to suffer in Canada.
Funding for education has become a maze of programs and rules. It’s tied into land assessment, student population and bureaucratic whims. In its simplest form, education operational funding could be and should be funded by sending a per student cheque for each student to each school division. As it is today, it takes a lawyer and an accountant to figure out the school funding process and that wastes a lot of bureaucratic money that could go to the front lines. Every principal knows how many students are in his school. Send in the enrolment and get the cheque. It’s pretty simple. But simple doesn’t employ enough bureaucrats to keep the unions happy.
Education operational funding should be provided by the province and the province only. There should be no land owners taxation for education. There should also be no provincial funding for municipal operational spending either. The province should simply move towards a system where they fully fund education operations and not fund municipal operations. Capital funding is a different matter for both municipalities and the school divisions, but operationally, the two streams need to be separated. If school taxes were eliminated, provincial revenue would have to go up, but not as much as we might think. The province wouldn’t send any operational funding to the municipalities.
The formula is pretty simple but, admittedly, I don’t have the totals. The theory can be summarized as follows:
1. Responsibility for education should be provincial and municipal spending should be municipal.
2. Operational funding for education should be provided provincially, not municipally.
3. Operational funding for municipalities should be provided municipally, not provincially.
4. Shift the money the province sends to municipalities to education.
5. Municipalities can raise taxes by whatever amount the school taxes would have been to compensate.
This information should be readily available and the questions need to be asked. If this information isn’t readily available, then the right questions aren’t being asked.
