Mayor Sam Katz didn't lose $43 million from the three levels of government to spruce up community centres, after putting the kibosh on bus rapid transit -- a pie-in-the-sky brain fart that was based on almost no research whatsoever. No, Katz didn't lose the money -- a third of which is city money, anyway -- because he never had it.
In the world of tri-partite funding agreements -- the fancy word for funding from the three levels of government -- you never "have" the money until the money is in the bank.
And the $17 million each from the province and Ottawa for BRT was nowhere near the city's bank account.
In fact, the city hadn't even applied for the money when the three levels of government made the funding announcement last year.
This is how it works:
Politicians from the three levels of government get together at a press conference, announce some funding "agreement" from their favourite infrastructure fund and everybody smiles and shakes hands.
Over time, new governments are elected, priorities change and the money announced for one project is suddenly shifted to another.
It happens all the time.
The money is never "lost," as some have suggested, regarding community centre funding.
It just gets spent on something else.
And since there's only one taxpayer, it doesn't really matter which pot of money is used for what. What's important is what it's spent on.
Case in point: The city, the province and the federal government announced in the early 1990s a funding agreement to build the Kenaston underpass.
Like BRT, the project never materialized and to this day still hasn't been built. But the money wasn't "lost," it was just spent elsewhere in Winnipeg.
Sam Katz put a stop to BRT not because that money had to be redirected to community centres. He put a halt to it because it was a dumb idea based on zero planning and because there were higher spending priorities for the city.
Telling the public the $43 million from that fund would be redirected to community centres was probably a mistake for Katz because the federal government can never be held to its word until the cheque has cleared the bank.
Look at the proposed human rights museum for Winnipeg.
Last year the federal Liberals pledged to help fund the museum, now they're saying they never really committed to it.
Whatever.
BRT would have cost Winnipeg taxpayers a heck of a lot more than the proposed $51 million, anyway. As it turned out, the cost projection didn't include buses and other related costs. The second half of the south-corridor proposal had not been costed out, and there were no projections on ridership, revenues or operating costs.
It was a dog's breakfast.
Whether federal money for community centres comes out of one pool of money or another really makes no difference.
The important thing is that it's not going into a poorly conceived transit plan that would have likely turned out to be a white elephant.
We can be thankful for that.