The wrong time for higher taxes

At a time when Brandon home and business owners are facing a significant increase in the property taxes in order to pay for increased teacher salaries, it takes chutzpah for those same teachers to request that the Brandon School Division board of trustees raise taxes even higher this year.

At Monday’s school board meeting, Brandon Teachers’ Association president Sandra Thompson urged the trustees to address three “urgent” issues as part of the board’s 2026-27 budget deliberations — chronic underfunding, classroom size and complexity, and the need for more support for both students and teachers.

She told the board that funding provided by the board has not kept pace with the BSD’s rapid enrolment growth, nor with the increasingly complex needs of students. She argued that “Less funding means less support for students and more overworked teachers.”

In support of her request, she pointed out that “Brandon’s student population has grown by 19 per cent over the past decade, more than double the provincial average,” and that except for Grades 1 and 2, class sizes in Brandon schools are above the provincial average.

She warned the trustees that “teachers are burning out and leaving the profession … Their plates are full, and they’re overwhelmed.”

Rather than asking that the board hire additional teachers and support staff, Thompson said the BTA is asking for budgets that reflect the realities inside classrooms.

In response to the presentation, BSD Supt. Mathew Gustafson told the Sun on Tuesday that the concerns raised by the BTA align closely with those of the board and administration, particularly when it comes to prioritizing classroom needs. He pointed out, however, that the board is in a difficult position if provincial funding does not increase to cover rising costs, including salary harmonization.

That is exactly what is happening. In November, Gustafson revealed that the division faces an additional $6.8-million increase in salary and benefit costs this coming fiscal year, amounting to a 10 per cent property tax increase.

He said such a large increase would be almost entirely necessitated by the provincial government’s teacher harmonization policy, and that the increase still would not account for any other budgetary increases — no enrolment changes nor inflationary costs, whether controllable or uncontrollable.

As a result, in the absence of provincial funding to offset those millions of dollars in higher wage costs, school property taxes are expected to rise significantly in Brandon this spring, at a time when many home and business owners are already feeling the pain of affordability issues.

Viewed from that perspective, the teachers’ request for even more spending by the board — including hiring more teachers and assistants and requiring an even larger tax increase to finance those hires — is poorly timed to say the least. To make matters worse, it all but ignores the poor optics arising from the fact that the bulk of the tax increase is because of the massive raise teachers are receiving due to harmonization.

We share the teachers’ concern about class sizes, the complex issues they must address each day, and the growing issue of teacher burnout. We want the best for our teachers and our students, but the cure for those problems cannot be even higher property taxes.

With a growing number of home and business owners nearing the economic breaking point, other solutions must be considered and, in this case, that solution is found in the office of Education Minister Tracy Schmidt.

It is her government, her department, that has created the fiscal crunch the BSD is facing. It is her government’s duty to fix that problem, by providing a reasonable level of funding to address the salary harmonization issue.

After all, the province has provided $1 million to Brandon City Council in order to reduce the city’s proposed property tax increase, but has promised nothing to even partially offset the higher teacher costs being incurred by the BSD. That seems both unfair and illogical.

The Manitoba Teachers Society, which includes the Brandon Teachers’ Association, has tremendous influence with the provincial government. We urge both of those organizations to use that influence to secure additional funding for the BSD to cover the cost of teacher salary harmonization.

If they can accomplish that objective, the requests made by Thompson at Monday’s board meeting can be more favourably considered.