While the hike in the Provincial Sales Tax in Manitoba from 7% to 8% last year may have come as a surprise to most Manitobans, it turns out that it was something that the NDP government had been studying for many years.

New documents released last week show that Premier Greg Selinger and the NDP Cabinet asked for information about the economic viability of raising the PST in 2008 and every budget after that. The analysis of what an increase in the PST would provide to the NDP in tax revenues was something considered by the NDP Cabinet for a number of years.

Why this new information matters is because all through the 2011 election campaign Mr. Selinger vowed to Manitobans that he was not going to raise the PST. In fact, in a television interview during the 2011 provincial election Mr. Selinger said that any notion that he was planning to raise the PST was “total nonsense.” Now we know that he made those comments even after having studied an increase in the PST for three years before.

Of course, Manitobans saw that very shortly after the election an expansion of the PST to new products came and the year after came the increase of the PST to 8%.  And after the increase Mr. Selinger tried to convince Manitobans that it was needed for everything from flooding, to splash parks to roads and that he had only recently looked at the increase.

For Manitobans it is just another added insult. It was bad enough when it became clear that the NDP had lied to Manitobans in the 2011 election about not raising the PST, but it is made worse by the fact that the NDP had been looking into the increase for a few years before the promise was ever made.

And so with the knowledge that the NDP had been looking at the PST increase for years, what becomes of the excuses for the increase that the NDP have been trying to sell to Manitobans? They don’t have much credibility either.

Most Manitobans understand that there is enough money in the provincial government that if waste and mismanagement were cut a balanced budget could be produced without higher taxes. In fact, the 2014 provincial budget documents show that even without an increase in the PST the province would have seen an increase in its revenues by $1.75 billion over the next four years.

The problem wasn’t that the NDP didn’t have enough money. The problem is that no matter how much they have its never going to be enough. And that’s why they have been looking at the PST increase for a number of years.