City hall and fairness for the future

Winnipeg is now larger than ever. After slow growth in the 1990s, the city has gained over 200,000 new residents and surpassed 850,000 people in 2025. By any measure — cranes, new neighbourhoods, newcomers — we succeeded. Still, by the end of 2024, the city’s finance chair admitted we were in “new territory” — the rainy-day fund was empty for the first time anyone on council could recall.

After a generation of growth, the treasury is left with nothing.

Growth should build on itself.

More people should mean more property value, more revenue, and, if managed well, more money saved to fix the roads, pipes and buildings everyone relies on.

Instead, Winnipeg now owes more to the future than ever before. The city’s 2024 infrastructure plan says we need $8 billion over the next decade for unfunded projects — about 63 per cent of everything we know we need to build or repair. That gap has grown by $2.3 billion since 2020. The 2024 operating budget swung between deficit forecasts of $20 million and $40 million, supported by tax increases and, in 2025, the biggest property-tax hike in 34 years.

We did not get a major pandemic bailout to soften the blow. We grew, and we spent what we gained.

This is not just the result of one budget or one council. The finance chair explained the problem clearly — for years, the city balanced its books by underfunding services such as snow clearing and by overestimating transit revenue.

In other words, we borrowed from the future to make today seem affordable. Every time we used reserve funds or delayed repairs, we shifted a bit of wealth from future Winnipeggers to those living here now. The real problem is not just numbers on a spreadsheet, but a habit — a way of thinking that treats the future like a credit line with no one there to say no.

This habit is debated most loudly between generations. Millennials say they inherited expensive housing, neglected repairs and a tax bill for services their parents enjoyed but did not fully pay for. Boomers say they built the city, paid their share and are tired of being blamed.

But if you listen closely, both sides are really saying the same thing: someone left me with the problems. Neither group wants to be the one that leaves a mess for the next generation and calls it an inheritance. That is the opportunity — both sides already agree, but they have not put it in writing.

So let’s put it in writing. We would not be creating something new. Here in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory, in the heart of the Métis homeland, this idea already exists — it is called seven-generations thinking. Based on the Haudenosaunee Great Law, it means every important decision should consider its impact seven generations into the future. Intergenerational equity is just that idea, applied to budgets — each generation should leave the city at least as strong as they found it.

This principle is easy to nod along to and easy to abandon the moment money is tight. Principles that disappear under pressure are not real principles.

That’s why Winnipeg needs a system that makes this rule count, especially when it is hard to follow. It does not have to be complicated. Set a rule that asset renewal and a healthy reserve are funded before new spending; ban draining the rainy-day fund without a clear, public plan to refill it; and add an intergenerational-impact line to every major budget decision, showing what it will cost people who cannot vote yet — because they are eight years old or not born.

That system needs to be built together, not forced from above.

This is where the tension between generations can actually help. The energy spent arguing at town halls, community groups and resident meetings is the same energy needed to build support for real change — it just needs to be chilled. Talking things through is how a shared complaint can become a rule everyone will stand behind. Boomers who do not want the blame and millennials who do not want the bill can agree on one thing — we need to make sure no future council can raid the future again.

It all comes down to one question — when our generation is finished, what will we leave behind?

Right now, the honest answer is a bigger city and an empty bank account — problems disguised as progress. We can do better, not because we will suddenly become perfect, but because we can create a system that makes careful planning the norm and borrowing from the future rare.

The debate we are having already holds the solution we need. We just need to stop arguing long enough to put it into the rules.

Hersh Seth is a Winnipeg resident and community organizer.