Last week’s NDP provincial budget added at least another $422 million to the debt as Greg Selinger continued his trend of spending way more than what the province receives in revenue. In fact, he has managed to double the provincial debt in only six years.
This may have surprised many Manitobans who still remember Mr. Selinger making a promise to balance the budget by 2014. Of course he broke that promise and instead said he would balance the budget by 2016. And now he has again broken that promise by saying he will balance the budget by 2018.
A dwindling number of Manitobans actually believe the promises that are made by the NDP government anymore. Having been told by the NDP that no new taxes were coming and then having two budgets with the largest tax increases in Manitoba history put upon them, it’s hardly any wonder few people believe them anymore.
But the audacity reached a new level last week when Mr. Selinger denied even making the promise to balance the budget at all. Instead he said that his promise was never actually written in stone. In fact, he didn’t view it as really much more than a target at best.
What Premier Selinger failed to mention is that while his promise wasn’t written in stone, it is written in law. When the NDP started running annual deficits in the province they had to change the province’s balance budget law, one of several changes they have made to water down the legislation. They changed it to allow themselves the ability to run deficits until 2016. But under the law, and because of the changes that Greg Selinger himself made, the budget has to come back into balance by 2016.
Now Mr. Selinger is talking about the need to change the balanced budget law yet again to allow him to keep running deficits. The fact that he would consider something that he himself wrote into law as not actually being a promise would be comical if it wasn’t costing Manitobans so much of its future. And it means that we are no longer left to believe what Mr. Selinger says or even what is written in the law. Unless the NDP chisel something into stone, apparently it means nothing.
