Slurpees & Murder

You and I might not see eye to eye on everything, gentle reader, but I think we can find common ground in agreeing that Western civilization’s post-Second World War optimism for the future used to be just absolutely adorable. We’ll have flying cars! And helpful robots! We’ll have teleportation devices, matching jumpsuits and cures for every disease — and we’ll all live in spaceships, or in those silly-looking houses on poles from The Jetsons.
   
This futurism, a boundless idealism looking forward through rose-tinted space goggles, lives on in some places; even just last week, down in the United States, one Republican Presidential candidate was genuinely and seriously advocating for a permanent American space colony on the moon. (Once that colony hits 13,000 residents, it will become eligible for consideration as the 51st state. I’m not making that up as a snarky aside — that was genuinely part of the pitch.)
   
Future expectations here in little old Winnipeg, however, have always been less bombastic; we hoped for things like a comprehensive rapid transit system, or a population of a million people, or an inner ring road to more efficiently transport passengers and goods around the city. Then, matching these reasonable and attainable goals to our long local tradition of sound fiscal strategies and thoughtful civic planning, we made Winnipeg the city it is today — a city that, half a century later, still has none of these things. Still, there is hope; perhaps not immediate hope, but bear with me for a moment here.
   
I’ve written previously about our City’s 2012 capital budget and accompanying 2013-2017 five-year forecast, in which our elected leaders committed to raising Winnipeg’s collective debt to well over a billion dollars by the end of 2015 — much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of whatever poor sap will be running the city by then. (It may behoove the next set of mayoral candidates to take up extreme couponing beforehand, just for practice.) This borrowing and spending on capital projects will continue through to the end of 2017, at which point we should really start thinking about paying some of it off — and it’s a long, long road back to the other end of the ledger. We only just recently finished paying off the interest from debts incurred at the tail end of the Norrie administration, and he left office in 1992, so that gives you some idea of what we’re looking at here.
   
Now, we’ve decided we’ll be throwing money at problems for the next five years, and our fair city’s last tangle with the demons of debt took well over a decade to resolve — years which, I’m sure we can agree, were not really Winnipeg’s Golden Age. (For a fun home game, sit down and try to identify what Winnipeg’s actual Golden Age must have been; you’ll need a pad of paper, a pencil and at least one bottle of bourbon.) So looking forward, if we’re being completely honest, it’s fair to expect that the city’s next 18 or so years are going to be an almost complete wash.
   
But never let it be said that I am not an optimist! I believe very strongly in looking forward and dreaming big for the future, so let us all band together in the spirit of excitement and idealism to prepare for all the great things we can start accomplishing once we’ve paid off our debts again sometime around 2030. All the comforts and technological marvels you could imagine! Traffic lights that are properly synchronized, ‘heated’ bus shelters that actually give off heat, free wireless Internet in our Convention Centre and maybe even — dare we dream? — another four whole kilometres of rapid transit!
   
Perhaps I’m setting myself up for disappointment; perhaps one day in the future, people will look back and laugh at me, too, for being such a dreamer. But you have to hope, don’t you? God, you have to hope.
   
James Hope Howard routinely uses the line "Why, Hope’s my middle name!" Nobody’s ever impressed.

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