We often use the New Year to make a number of resolutions. These resolutions usually revolve around self improvement and how we would like to better ourselves in the coming year.
Many people end up making the same or similar resolutions year after year because they go unfulfilled during the previous year. In reality, resolutions are simply goals that we set for ourselves at what seems like an appropriate time to do so, the start of a new year. If these resolutions go unfulfilled, there may be a personal sense of disappointment, but usually the only person you have to answer to for the failed resolution is yourself.
Promises have a different stature than resolutions do. Most often promises are made to someone else and they are a commitment. We learn at a young age that a promise is to be kept. Any elementary school student will tell you that.
The difference however seems to have been lost on the provincial NDP government. While they have made many promises to Manitobans over the past few years, they tend to be treated by the NDP more like resolutions. They see them as goals more than commitments. Take for example the promise that the NDP made during the last election not to raise taxes. It was a clear promise. Yet, after the election, the NDP cabinet ministers and MLAs began talking as though that was actually more of a goal than a promise. And then they raised the PST and a host of other taxes.
Then there was the promise by the NDP to balance the provincial budget by 2014. That promise of course was not fulfilled and was soon replaced by another promise, this time to balance the budget by 2016. Now, as that date draws another year closer, Premier Greg Selinger and his NDP MLAs are talking as though that wasn’t so much a promise either, but really more of a goal, kind of like a resolution.
Manitobans of course know the difference between a promise and a resolution but it appears that the NDP don’t. And while the NDP puzzle over why so many Manitobans are expressing their distrust in them as a government they should consider, as we begin a new year, that the consequences for breaking promises are very different than that of breaking resolutions. And while resolutions may be the sort of thing that you can make over and over each year if you don’t succeed in them, promising people the same thing year after year and not fulfilling those promises is something very different.
Instead of a provincial government that governs by resolution, Manitobans deserve one that actually keeps its promises. And that knows the difference between the two.
