This past week the NDP have been trying their best to tell you that they are taking more and more money out of your pockets and putting it into roads. While it is true they are taking more money out of your pockets the fact is much of it isn’t going to roads and infrastructure at all.
You will continue to hear announcement after announcement from the NDP about road repair. In fact, you have been hearing those same announcements for years and yet our roads don’t ever seem to improve. Why is that? It’s because the NDP are running a bait and switch scheme with infrastructure money.
Every year the NDP announce a dollar figure that they will be spending on road repair in the coming year. And every year they trumpet that number. What they don’t tell you at the end of the year is that they almost always fall drastically short of the projected expenditure. Of the course the NDP are not known as a government that comes in under budget on anything. In this case, what they are doing is announcing an inflated budget on road repair at the beginning of the year to try to convince Manitobans they are repairing our crumbling infrastructure and then part way through the year they quietly start moving that money to other places.
As an example, the NDP promised in the 2012 budget that they would be investing $1.719 billion in infrastructure. At the end of the budget year it turned out that they had spent about $500 million less than budgeted and put that money into other places where there was overspending. If Manitobans have been wondering why our roads seem to be getting worse even as the NDP promise to spend more and more, its because the NDP routinely over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to roads.
If the NDP were finding ways to reduce waste and save dollars that would be a good thing. But in this case they are simply taking money that was earmarked for roads and putting it into other areas where they are overspending. It shows that they really don’t believe that infrastructure is a priority.
It’s the same story when it comes to the increase in taxes. Last year the NDP increased the Gas Tax and collected $70.3 million more in revenue. They promised to put that money back into roads. But instead that money disappeared into general revenues and there was no more money put into repairing roads.
So prepare for a blizzard of announcements by the NDP on infrastructure. And prepare to be disappointed by the results. Because the bait and switch scheme that the NDP are running isn’t going to improve our roads.
