Last week I went to Winnipeg’s City Hall to speak to Council about the latest version of our city’s financial management plan. Maybe they assumed I was just another random, crazy guy coming to rage against the machine. But they would have been only half-right; I wasn’t there to rage against the machine.

The financial management plan is a key policy document for the City. It will frame all other policy decisions, including budgeting, for years to come. Reading through the financial management plan may not seem like a regular citizen’s idea of fun. But I’m not a regular citizen. I am a responsible, admittedly nerdy, citizen of Winnipeg, and so I did my civic duty and read through the plan. Later I watched videos of the Standing Policy Committee and the Executive Policy Committee (EPC) to see what councillors had been saying about it.

I was shocked to discover that our EPC had approved it without any discussion or even a single question. Surely a document of this importance deserved more than a rubber stamp? I was somewhat encouraged watching the councillors in action during the Finance Committee meeting. Two councillors in particular deserve to be congratulated for their relevant and often probing questioning of the public service on this plan. And one question in particular stuck with me.

The Financial Management Plan sets out eight financial goals — and I’m quoting directly from the plan here — “against which current and future financial performance can be measured.” One figure in the plan reports that from 2011 to 2018, the City’s property assessment base grew by 58%. To this, Councillor Nason asked: “Compared to what?”

This is an insightful question. Because as with any financial figure, reporting it on its own is kind of irrelevant. Is that good? Is that bad? We can’t know. A financial figure only has real meaning when it’s compared to something else…either that same figure over time, or in relation to another measurement.

Now, Councillor Nason was asking to compare it in relation to overall growth in GDP, and, for the record, I don’t think he ever got a straight answer on that. Personally, I was more interested in comparing the growth of the property assessment base to two other goals in the plan, specifically #7 (debt) and #5 (infrastructure). Because if you’re going to brag about the growth under one goal, surely you’ll want to do the same for all the goals?

Well, surprise, surprise, those numbers aren’t in there.

Being the resourceful nerd I am, I was able to find the debt numbers in some other report buried on the City website. What that report says is that, while our assessment base grew 58% over those seven years, our debt grew by about 100% over the same period. That’s right, it basically doubled. And it is projected to continue increasing, so that, after ten years, it will have almost tripled.

All of a sudden, that 58% doesn’t sound so hot.

What about infrastructure? How much did our infrastructure grow from 2011 to 2018? It turns out my super-nerd powers have limits. I couldn’t find that information anywhere. That, in and of itself, is extremely troubling. And that’s why I went to City Hall to speak to Council.

What I told Council is that infrastructure, from a financial perspective, behaves very much like debt.