Right in the centre -Replace the anguish with courage, wisdom.

Details

Published on Thursday, March 2, 2017

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

When a business person is confronted with an annually recurring problem, they take steps to reduce or eliminate the problem. The problem of the season at this time of year, and every year, is the agonizing over school taxes and who pays for what. A huge amount of energy and even more verbal input goes into what to do about school taxes.

Each year, the province offers up a small increase. The school boards threaten to cut services unless more money comes through. Winnipeg School division is threatening to cut police presence in the schools and adult crossing guards for example. The province denies they can afford any more funds and they may well be correct in that assumption. The province is a billion dollars over budget every year it seems. It is definitely time for a major shift in how schools are funded. 

A province wide policy is needed and it would have major benefits for all people, regardless of economic status.

The province needs to decide if it does indeed care about education. On the surface they do, or they say they do, but their actions deny that belief. The province doesn’t really get involved with education of a large percentage of Manitoba students, namely the First Nations schools. That is left to a floundering federal system that has, at least in the past, lead to inequities in education outcomes. 

The province, under the BNA Act is responsible for education of all students, end of story. They should own up to that and the federal government should pay for their First Nation responsibilities and back away. The province, being responsible for all education issues within the province should also fund education 100 per cent. Education is a service to the people, not to property so there is no justification whatsoever to pay for education with property taxes. None, zero! Services to land, to property, to infrastructure should be paid with property taxes, not education. Besides, just because a person owns property doesn’t mean they have the ability to pay education taxes on their property. Education should be funded by sales tax and income taxes. There would be a shift from property to income and sales tax but that shift would be more affordable to every taxpayer. 

Education needs to be funded from provincial revenues and, right off the bat, there could be some savings. We have a bureaucracy that collects taxes and then rebates taxes to residences, to seniors, to farmers. It’s a ridiculously wasteful system that only a union bureaucrat could dream up to make work. 

The province needs to set an education budget and then send a cheque four times a year to the school divisions on a per student basis depending on their enrolment. A designated part of the cheque would be assigned to operations and part to reserves. A school division could put more into reserves if they wished to do so. School facilities should be given to the divisions by the province. Any future re-builds or new schools would be funded from reserves and from the future reserve portion of the quarterly per student annual grant. It’s a very simple business-like approach that makes business sense. A lot of bureaucratic and political wailing and wasteful talk would be eliminated. If a division has 1,000 students, they get 1,000 quarterly student grants.

The municipalities would no longer have to collect school taxes. They would eliminate their own set of annual anguish over their own tax rates being adversely affected by school tax increases.

The province should negotiate with the teachers union and set a simplified teacher pay scale. Allowances could be made for expensive remote or northern locations. Teacher salaries should be capped at 20 years of service and after that, only a cost of living allowance increase be paid. By the way, business corporations should adopt that policy as well. It’s controversial but the case can easily be made that a person learns about all they need to learn in the first 20 years in one particular job.

What it boils down to is that I have been observing this annual spring ritual of tax wailing and weeping for 50 years and it has only gotten worse. The province has to take leadership on this issue and the majority of the burden falls on Education Minister Ian Wishart, Premier Brian Pallister and Finance Minister Cameron Friesen. I know them all well and I suspect they agree with me. It remains to be seen if they have the courage and wisdom to implement the much needed changes.