Gage Haubrich is the Prairie Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.Saskatoon spent $100,000 on a plastic rock and put it on display at the landfill.And that’s not even the worst way cities waste your tax dollars.City councils across the province hike property taxes every year and tell taxpayers there is nowhere in the budget to cut spending. But that cash sucked from your wallet isn’t all being used to fix roads, cut grass, or clean up garbage.Instead, chunks of it are being siphoned off to consultants and artists who can’t find work that isn’t a government contract.Nowhere is this ridiculous-project industrial complex more prevalent than the Paris of the Prairies.The city of Saskatoon recently spent almost $300,000 paying Calgary-based artists to make three plastic rocks and called it art.Real rocks would have cost taxpayers about half as much. Or the city could have asked a local farmer and probably gotten a few boulders to decorate the city for free.The plastic rocks are located in an empty field at the Forestry Farm Park, on the side of Circle Drive in Diefenbaker Park, and inside the Material Recovery Centre at the Saskatoon landfill.In total, the project cost as much as the entire property tax bills of about 118 average households.And this isn’t the only art in weird places the city billed Saskatoon taxpayers for. .The city also spent $90,000 putting up decorative light balls in a downtown back alley in 2023. The city then spent another $8,000 painting doors in the same back alley in 2024.But it doesn’t end there. The city also paid consultants to deliver “energy coaching” sessions in 2023. After spending more than $115,000 of federal taxpayers’ money on the program, the city delivered only three of these sessions.Also in 2024, the city paid more than $300,000 to consultants to come up with the name for the city’s Bus Rapid Transit system. The consultants came up with “Link,” a name that’s already used by lots of other cities.In 2025, the city paid more than $26,000 for an artificially intelligent garbage can that is supposed to tell people where to put their trash. The AI garbage can’s advice was wrong more than half the time.The provincial capital is no stranger to wasting this kind of money.The city of Regina wasted $30,000 on a failed tourism rebrand in 2024. The plan was to rebrand as Experience Regina with slogans such as “Regina, the city that rhymes with fun.” Five days after the rebrand was launched, the city scrapped it due to backlash.Regina doesn’t even know how much it’s spending on gift cards for staff. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation filed a freedom-of-information request with Regina asking how much money the city spent on gift cards last year. The city said that it “does not maintain a dedicated tracking system nor accounting code for gift cards.”A good first step in figuring out how to avoid wasting taxpayers’ money is knowing how much money you spent in the first place.Both Saskatoon and Regina hiked property taxes last year and plan to do so again this year.And it’s not just a big-city problem. City councils across the province are likely wasting money on similarly ridiculous things. Taxpayers just haven’t found out about the waste yet.That’s because there’s also the issue of transparency around these ridiculous projects. The cities didn’t publish the costs of these schemes. Taxpayers only know how much their councils fleeced them on most of these programs because the CTF filed access-to-information requests to unearth the cost.Next time city hall is hiking your taxes because it says it can’t find any savings in the budget, tell your city councillors to check again.Gage Haubrich is the Prairie Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
