Noakes tears into city budget
Taylor C. Noakes tears into the city budget, which – as he points out – tends to get forgotten by the media because it’s launched right before Christmas. His comparison of the increased police budget vs. the funds promised for “green” projects is particularly sharp.
Jeff 08:45 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
At first, I was outraged by the increased police budget. It flies in the face of calls to defund and explore alternatives to the police, but this morning I had an alternate theory. What if the money is to help the police take down the mob? It’s kind of an open secret that Montreal has to deal with organized crime, and building a cases against mob leaders can take months and years of dedicated resources, and that can get pretty costly. If you were the mayor, you probably wouldn’t want to announce that the money is for taking down the mob because then it would indicate that we have a problem with organized crime, and perhaps not enough money to fight it. It would make the police’s job harder because the mobsters would be more cautious, and in the worst-case, it could make the mayor a target for criminals. Indeed, the best thing would be to sneak a police budget increase and not say exactly what it’s for. Does this sound plausible?
dwgs 09:02 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
@Jeff… No.
Jeff 10:39 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
why not? @dwgs
SMD 10:57 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Jeff, this is the province where the police, with the backing of a major political party, do approach the mafia… to ask for their help in reducing gun violence: https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2021/10/21/lutte-contre-les-fusillades-a-montreal-la-mafia-doit-simpliquer-dit-le-plq.
steph 11:46 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
@Jeff, you’re pulling at strings. Giving corrupt cops MORE money to have them do their job properly? just no.
dwgs 12:46 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Well first of all Jeff because that would require a level of organization, cooperation, and confidentiality heretofore unseen in the history of this fine city.
Chris 14:01 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
>It flies in the face of calls to defund…
There are in fact few such calls. Mostly a vocal minority. Even amongst African Americans, only 28% support the defund movement.
Ian 19:00 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
First off, it’s not a movement. The right-wing media always insists on seeing social justice concerns as organized movements, it makes it easier to manufacture “sides” since of course intersectionality is a conspiracy.
More importantly, Plante herself talked about “a big, big conversation” around redistributing funds that go to police back in 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/plante-police-defund-discussion-1.5603076
Was she lying? Is she a girouette? Did the police union put pressure on someone? We will never know, but we say with absolute certainty that Plante is an opportunist and a hypocrite with no real political convictions other than getting re-elected.
Kate 21:17 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Ian, I don’t think her motives are that cynical. But she made a serious mistake in letting Denis Coderre dictate the terms in that part of the election campaign. She must have worried about the electoral appeal of his promise of law and order, and tried to cut him off at the pass. Unfortunately, it left her holding the bag, a promise of hiring more cops, that she’s now stuck with.
Under the right circumstances I think Projet could sell the case for, if not radically defunding the police, at least readjusting the budget so that more of the cash could go to mixed squads with social workers and others who don’t lead with their firearms. But the surge of recent killings including several teenagers is inevitably provoking calls for more policing – even when we know that putting more patrol cars out there is not a solution.
Max 23:28 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
> the SPVM [is] eating up nearly 20% of the municipal budget
Can someone confirm that this figure is factually accurate?
If a safe and civilized city such as Montreal is spending 1 in 5 municipal tax dollars on security, something is seriously, seriously wrong. I’ve known for years that things are screwy, that we’re paying a lot of white folks $100K+ / year each to basically play with their phones and push traffic light buttons on street corners. That they work only 25 years or so, before retiring to collect generous pensions for as many years or more. But to the tune of 20% of our municipal tax dollars?
Please tell me that I’m on drugs and that the SPVM is not a mafia holding our entire city hostage.
Kate 13:55 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Max, the pie chart on page 5 of the city budget document gives 17.7% as the proportion for public security.
Ian 14:29 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Regardless we already have more cops per capita than any other major Canadian city. Just putting this out there but maybe our problems could be solved with clowns instead.
https://twitter.com/TedRutland/status/1478006254614233089?t=2Q8MB7oNk0cRVJCWHJy7tg&s=19
Jeff 14:48 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
According to Toronto’s 2019 budget, $703 out of the average $3020 paid in property-tax goes to police services (Chart 3, pg. 112). That’s 23%. Vancouver’s 2022 police budget is 20% of the overall budget too (DRAFT 2022 OPERATING BUDGET, pg. A-10). In Ottawa, it appears to be 43% of their budget, though their report for 2022 is harder to understand (2022 Draft Budget Operating Summaries).
Kate 16:25 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Here’s a page showing some U.S. cities for comparison.
CE 17:24 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
What is the obsession with clowns? Am I missing something here?
MarcG 20:27 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
CE: Do you live in Montreal? 🙂 Ian is riffing on the fact that one of the city’s big ideas for reviving the downtown in 2020 was to have clowns walk around scaring children.
Ian 22:18 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
In the past couple of years clowns have been part of most city funded “animation” revitalization projects.
Ian 22:24 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
To be fair, we love the clowns.
It just seems funny that no matter what, whether business is bad or there’s a lot of construction or there’s a plague or whatever, the city’s answer is clowns.
For years this has been the deal, and yes I understand we have circuses and circus schools and circus fests. They are a big part of the Montreal identity now.
As Babs says:
“But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here”