Winnipeg’s preliminary budget for 2025 was released on Dec. 11. You’d never know it based on local media coverage of the budget, but the Winnipeg Police is once again set to receive massive funding increases over the next several years, gobbling up almost one-third of all new property tax revenues and the city budget in general.
In 2025 alone, the city’s direct funding of police — described in the budget as “mill rate support” — will increase by $15.1 million per year (to $293.1 million), followed by another increase in 2026 of $16.6 million per year (to $309.7 million). By 2027, the WPS will be receiving almost $40.9 million per year more from the city than it did in 2024, reaching a whopping $318.8 million per year.
This means that the City of Winnipeg will continue spending the same amount in operating funding on the WPS as all of the following municipal services combined: public transit, recreation, parks and natural areas, libraries, urban forestry, active transportation, and arts, entertainment, and culture.
There has been widespread media coverage of the city’s 5.95% property tax hike, which will increase city revenues by $52.2 million in 2024 and a whopping $126.9 million in 2027, relative to 2024 levels. Much of this coverage has deferred to the city’s own narrative of what the money is for: things like snow-clearing, transit operations, and other objectively beneficial services. However, the reality is that this tremendous boost in police spending will consume 32.2% of all new property tax funding.
As is always the case, the vast majority of this new spending for police will go into paying existing cops even more money and hiring another 36 cops over several years. A relevant point: around 1,300 WPS employees already make at least six-figures per year in compensation, and a new recruit can hit that lucrative bracket after only five years on the job. It’s no surprise that interim WPS chief Art Stannard declared the proposed budget as “great news.”
City spending makes up the majority of WPS funding. However, the cops also receive an additional $60 million a year from the province and its own service revenue, such as traffic enforcement and contracted “special duty” policing. All up, WPS annual total expenses – which combines operating with debt/interest charges for capital projects – will increase from $332.3 million in 2024, to $352.7 million in 2025, to $370.4 million in 2026, to $380.5 million in 2027. In other words, by 2027, the WPS will be spending almost $50 million more per year than it did in 2024, every single year.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that the “cop-to-population” ratio that Gillingham and Stannard have cited as justification for the increased police funding has absolutely no evidence behind it, nor any goal of what a desired ratio even is. Major cities across Canada have wildly different ratios — Ottawa has 131.5, Calgary 153.1, and Montreal 221.1 — and the fact that Winnipeg’s has one of 167.5 says nothing at all about the city’s conditions or needs.
When your bus is late, or you can't get your kid into swimming lessons, or your local library is closed on evenings or weekends, you can blame Scott Gillingham, city council, and their pathetic deference to the Winnipeg Police and the punishment bureaucracy. The only solution to this ever-worsening crisis is to freeze the WPS budget, reallocate new spending to life-sustaining services that actually keep people safe, and transition away from the costly and harmful system of policing and jailing altogether.