Budget? What Budget?

Have you ever made a budget and missed it by a billion dollars? If you answered yes to that question, you must be the NDP Premier of Manitoba.

Last week it was announced that the cost of the Bi-Pole III power line being run down from northern Manitoba to the south along one of the longest routes imaginable had jumped from $2.2 billion to at least $3.2 billion. Premier Greg Selinger shrugged off this billion dollar increase as no big deal. After all, it’s not his money. It will be Hydro ratepayers who make up the additional cost.

It’s part of a pattern that Manitobans have seen with the NDP government. When the downtown Manitoba Hydro office tower was first planned the NDP pegged the cost at $75 million dollars. When the final bills came in, the cost of the building was $283 million. Then there is the new stadium that is currently under construction in Winnipeg and which is being financed entirely by taxpayers. The original cost of that project was $115 million. Yet, a few months after that figure was announced, Greg Selinger acknowledged that the cost would be closer to $200 million.

It’s hard to know exactly how the NDP government can consistently miss the budget on major projects by hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars. Some have suggested that they are purposely under budgeting projects to make them more acceptable to the public at the outset. It may just be that the NDP are simply very poor money managers. One thing is sure, no projects seem to be coming in under budget.

This trend is most concerning with the new Bi-Pole power line because there are ways to reduce the cost of the project. The most obvious way would be to pick the route that would be the shortest possible. The longer the line, the more it costs in the short and the long term. Yet the NDP don’t seem very concerned about the cost of the project. They know that it may result in higher hydro electric rates for years to come but that doesn’t seem to be enough to encourage the NDP to change their decision.

The inability to create and to meet a budget is just one of the reasons that the provincial debt has grown over the past decade. Each and every provincial budget that the NDP has introduced has ended in overspending of budgeted projections.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the most recent official cost estimate for Bi-Pole III is a billion dollars higher than the initial estimate. For Mr. Selinger and the NDP, it’s just business as usual.