It’s an often used strategy in politics that before any significant announcement, leaders and officials work to lower the bar of expectations. That’s because how positively the public receives an announcement is directly correlated to what their expectations were. This is apparently a strategy that NDP Premier Wab Kinew is not a fan of, as he managed to take the exact opposite approach in the lead up to Tuesday’s provincial budget.
In the days before the budget, the NDP Premier was suggesting that his government’s third budget would be the best budget Manitoba had ever seen. For Manitobans who are living through an affordability crisis and struggling to buy food or fill up their gas tank, this certainly raised hopes on what to expect in the budget. Which was why the actual budget was surprising in just how very little it delivered to struggling Manitobans. The Premier raised the bar as high as he could for expectations and then delivered a budget that seemed out of touch with the reality faced by many Manitobans.
The promise that the NDP was trying the hardest to sell as an affordability measure was the commitment to remove the provincial sales tax from the few items that it currently applies to. While almost all food items are already free from PST, there are a few items on which the tax is applied, such as snack food and prepared meals. The savings that might be had from removing PST on these items won’t pay for the recent price increase on a tin of coffee for the average family.
At the same time, while the NDP have presided over school taxes that have increased in some cases as much as 40% since they returned to office, the budget promised to provide only $100 in tax relief to some homeowners.
The reality is that heading into Tuesday’s budget, Manitobans had been indicating that there top concerns were that they could not afford the high cost of groceries and gas, that they were increasingly scared of being the victim of a crime and that they worried that if they or their loved one had to go to an Emergency Room they would not be seen before their condition worsened significantly. Those were the top concerns of Manitobans. And they will continue to be the top concerns for Manitobans because nothing in the budget will meaningfully make Manitobans better off financially, safer, or more likely to get timely care in an Emergency Room.
Also top of mind for many Manitobans was whether the NDP would be able to get a handle on the ballooning deficit. The answer to that seems a clear “no”. Last year the NDP projected a budget deficit of about $750 million. In reality, it was more than double that amount. Some of that increase was due to the cost of fighting forest fires and the fact that the NDP only budgeted $50 million for battling summer fires. This year, they are again only budgeting $50 million and hoping for massive transfer payments from Ottawa. They hope it rains, they hope there are not fires and they hope Ottawa bails them out. However hope is not a plan. And it hasn’t proven to work for the NDP so far as they have missed every one of their financial targets.
Instead of the best budget in history, what Manitobans got was one of the biggest hype jobs ever. But one that will do nothing to address the concerns they have about affordability, crime and healthcare wait times.
