This is the attitude that gets you a series of unending tax hikes, because there are no areas where any restraint can be shown. The city (currently) is taking action in several areas that are (arguably, hence the difficult decision comment) outside its scope. We’re spending money on mental health services for example, which is pretty clearly provincial.
Then you have new spending on things like climate change initiatives, affordable housing off the top of my head. As new spending, there absolutely have to be areas here that can be trimmed back and no one would know the difference.
And that’s really my point here. Just because the city could save money doesn’t mean slashing existing programming and austerity. But part of the issue here is that if anyone suggested we should reduce in these areas they’d get tarred with the “why do you hate the environment” brush, or “why don’t you want affordable housing for people?”
And lastly, this is only going to be worse when we have political parties in civic politics. That’s a bit of a tangent, but suddenly that becomes a scenario where there are two answers and no more to these issues, which just creates more polarization.
|