The NDP are spending your money again. This time, they are throwing around your tax dollars in an apparent effort to buy the support of a few thousand NDP members who will be deciding who is going to be Premier after March 8th.
The NDP leadership contest, in which Premier Greg Selinger is trying to keep his job against two opponents, has become bizarre political theatre. Each of the three contestants are trying to say they are the candidate of renewal but, when combined, they have spent more than half a century in the Manitoba Legislature.
In their quest for power, they are making a number of promises that either cost millions of dollars or that they have failed to fulfill in the past 15 years of government. This past week one of the candidates, Theresa Oswald, promised to hire more midwives to allow for more child births to happen in non hospital settings. That is something that Progressive Conservative’s have been calling on for years and that the NDP have promised for years but have failed to achieve repeatedly. The NDP even spent $3.2 million on a new birthing centre in 2010 that they said would handle 500 births a year. But five years later the birthing centre is running at 9% capacity because of a lack of midwives. And who was the Health Minister overseeing all these problems? That person was Theresa Oswald, the person now promising to fix it.
Another leadership candidate promised to create a new Minister of “local food”. Of course they had no idea how much this would cost or how it would relate to the already existing ministry of Agriculture. Those details are not as important as trying to get a couple of extra votes in the leadership apparently.
Then there was a promise by NDP leadership contender Steve Asthon to create an additional 3,000 new child care spaces. The shortage of spaces has grown almost every year that the NDP have been in power but now Mr. Asthon wants Manitobans to believe this new promise. And how exactly does he plan to go about creating these spaces? Simple he says, he is going to ask the federal government to give even more money to Manitoba to pay for it all.
The leadership race in the NDP is proving to be costly. The dysfunction hurts the province and is an embarrassment. And all of the promises to do what they have failed to do for the past 15 years are adding up. And whoever the NDP leader is after March 8th they are coming to Manitobans looking for money to pay for it all.
