Much has been made of the City of Flin Flon’s supposedly unsustainable spending habits.
It seems like every time the city upgrades a facility, replaces a sewer pipe or hires a new employee, a chorus of penny-pinchers has something to say about it.
“We’re in over our heads,” they insist. “Where’s all the money going to come from?”
Yes, Flin Flon seems to be full of deficit hawks, the types who place great emphasis on keeping government budgets “under control” – whatever that means to them.
They fear our level of municipal debt – in the form of debentures, wherein certain projects are paid off over a period of years instead of all at once – will ruin our civic finances.
Deficit hawks are the reason we hear calls for the city to end public transit, even though it is the only mode of transportation for some of our most vulnerable citizens, or to close a recreational facility, even though all of them add to our economic base and quality of life.
At the provincial levels, we can blame deficit hawks for the closure of STC, cutbacks to northern patient transportation subsidies and now the possibility of health care premiums in Manitoba.
Deficit hawks love to point out that since individual citizens can only spend as much money as they take in, why shouldn’t the same ring true of governments?
Of course individual citizens do not always spend as much as they take in and no more. If that were true, we wouldn’t have credit cards, mortgages and lines of credit.
Citizens who “deficit spend,” if you will, aren’t always doing so out of recklessness. Unforeseen circumstances, such as medical emergencies, can pop up. In those situations, going into debt doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
The City of Flin Flon, too, faces the unexpected. The municipality went $717,931 over budget in 2013, due largely or entirely to an exceptionally cold winter that wreaked havoc on water lines.
In and around 2013, the city also had to begin paying off its $5.4-million (possibly more to come) share of the state-of-the-art water treatment plant.
Unable to come up with that kind of cash at once – much like most people who buy a home, for instance – the city debentured the treatment plant price tag over a period of years.
How many deficit hawks would be willing to cancel water-line repairs if it meant they or their fellow citizens would lose water for days or weeks? How many would forego safe drinking water?
In government, deficit hawks are typically a provincial or national phenomenon. We don’t hear hawks on city council echo the sorts of things hawks who are private citizens say, such as “end public transit” or “close the pool.”
And with good reason. Deficit hawk proposals are usually unpopular. Heeding them is a recipe for defeat at the polls.
Out here in the non-government realm, most people would rather add to the public debt than lose important services, because government debt has no real meaning to their lives; it’s just a bunch of numbers on paper.
That’s not always a healthy situation, of course, as there can be times when deficit hawks are correct and there literally are insufficient funds to carry on at established spending levels.
But we’re not at such a point in Flin Flon, in Manitoba or in Canada. Only if that point arrives can the deficit hawks and their more extreme ideas rightly have a moment in the spotlight.
