It should come as no surprise to anyone that the NDP have missed again.
This past week the NDP confirmed what most Manitobans suspected, they will again miss their target to balance the provincial budget and Manitoba will sink even deeper into debt. It was back in 2010 that the NDP promised that, if they were reelected in 2011, they would balance the province’s books by 2014-2015.
When questioned on the campaign trail about whether he would be able to fulfill the promise to Manitobans, Premier Greg Selinger said things were actually ahead of schedule. Soon after Mr. Selinger was reelected as Premier however, it became clear that things were not ahead of schedule. In fact things were coming off the tracks fairly dramatically.
Despite expanding the provincial sales tax (PST) on to things like haircuts and home insurance, and increasing the PST from 7% to 8%, the NDP kept running up massive deficits every year. And so Mr. Selinger made a new promise. Instead of balancing the budget in 2014-15 as he originally promised, he assured Manitobans that his NDP government would balance the budget in 2016-2017, just in time for the next provincial election.
Even as this latest promise seemed more and more unlikely to be kept, Mr. Selinger assured Manitobans that things were looking good and the target would be met. But it was clear, as every quarterly financial update was released, that the NDP just kept on spending hundreds of millions over budget and kept borrowing more and more from the money-lenders. And all this despite taking hundreds of millions of dollars a year more out of the pockets of Manitobans through increased taxes.
So it was disappointing but hardly surprising when last Friday afternoon the NDP quietly announced that not only had they broken their original promise they would be breaking their second promise on balancing the budget as well. And now the new “target” for balancing the budget is 2018-2019. What has become clear is that this is a target that has no bull’s eye.
And all of these broken promises mean that the debt has more than doubled under the NDP government and there is interest to pay on that debt. Even in times of record low interest rates, which won’t last forever, that amounts to about $900 million in debt servicing costs per year. That is hundreds of millions of dollars that are not available for better healthcare services, to fix roads or to improve our education system. It is money that simply goes to pay interest on an ever increasing debt.
Manitobans have figured it out. The NDP simply are unable or unwilling to reduce waste and that threatens the front line services that Manitobans rely upon. And the constantly moving targets from the NDP have become nothing more than a sad joke that each of us is paying for.
