Seated comfortably inside his home, in front of his sprawling fireplace adorned with gold-plated candlestick holders atop the mantle, above which hung a large mirror in an immaculately carved frame, the Mayor of Fort Erie gazed into his laptop camera and assured his constituents that he understood the financial pressures they face.
It was a moment I will never forget. The weight of the tone deaf statement on financial pressures, delivered from a wealthy lawyer who has never known such pressure, was crushing.
For the record, I don’t begrudge mayor Wayne Redekop for his accumulation of wealth. Redekop is a good enough guy, and he spent many years working hard, providing for his family, and did well for himself; that’s a good thing and it should be respected.
But here’s where I think we messed up: we let people like him hold all the reins of power at the municipal level of government. City halls across the country are filled almost exclusively with people from the top tax brackets.
On both sides of the equation, too. Elected municipal officials are nearly all wealthy Boomers, and the staff are all $100K Sunshine Listers.
And that’s how we end up with Niagara Region officials patting themselves on the back for a job well done in delivering a 2025 budget with a 9.6 per cent tax hike. Any normal person should be ashamed of this thing. A massive hike to property taxes, at a time when regular people can least afford it? And for this they are bragging about what a fine fiscal budget they’ve put together?
In a news release following the passing of the budget, Regional Chair Jim Bradley said he would like to “commend” Niagara Region councillors for approving a “fiscally responsible budget.” Meanwhile, Niagara Region budget chair, Wayne Redekop, praised the budget for its “investments in our municipal infrastructure” as if we’re all supposed to be thankful for hiking our taxes to pay for the leaky pipes and potholed roads that should have been fixed decades ago by the Boomers, but instead are now the next generation's problem to fix.
Yay, thanks guys. So glad we have all those well-heeled Boomers looking out for the debt-riddled Millennials and Gen Zs.
Every year around this time, I write my annual ‘Santa Wish List’ column, wherein I take it upon myself to ask the big man in red to shower Niagara with various municipal presents.
This year’s list though, is simple. It contains but a single request: regular people councillors. No more wealthy lawyers, retired investment bankers, tenured professors, or real estate developers on council, please and thank you.
Y’know who I want representing me at Niagara Region headquarters? An HVAC repair guy. Or a pipe fitter who spent 30 years welding stuff at a factory somewhere. Someone who drove the local garbage trucks for a few decades would be the perfect council candidate in my books.
Just any real person who understands real world problems. Otherwise we keep getting these titanic tax hikes.
Because the rich guys at council don’t care. Every year at budget time, some number crunching nerd puts a line in the budget report that says that a 10 per cent hike is only an extra $200 on your tax bill. Then the rich guy councillors look at that and say to themselves, “Oh, only $200, that’s nothing. I spent more than that on dinner with my wife at Rizzo’s House of Parm last weekend.”
But a bunch of normal guys would look at that and say to themselves, “Damn, $200 that’s a lot, that’s like two week’s worth of groceries.”
As I outlined in a column a few weeks back, wealthy people and regular people will look at the same $200 and see two very different things. In the same way, rich dummies will look at a 9.6 per cent tax hike and think it’s just peachy, while a regular dude will look at a 9.6 per cent tax hike and think it’s absurd.
There are a lot of entrenched problems with our municipal system that make it so that rich white guys tend to be the people that end up getting elected. The solutions to those problems are complicated, but a good start would be paying councillors a decent salary, because right now being a councillor is something that only someone who is already independently wealthy can afford to do. Council work is sorta like a rich guy side hustle.
I propose we fix this by adding a single question to the form that council candidates fill out when registering to run for local office. At the end of the form it should ask: How many gold-plated candlestick holders do you own?
If the answer is anything other than “zero” then, sorry, application rejected.
James Culic has zero gold-plated candlestick holders and the only priceless artworks he owns are the ones his daughter makes at daycare using her fingers. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or lob a letter to the editor furiously etched into a fine bone china plate by clicking here.
