Desperate times call for out-of-character vote-seeking measures By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 5:20 PM CST Tuesday, Mar. 7, 2023 Last Modified: 7:25 PM CST Tuesday, Mar. 7, 2023 Updates

Opinion

The Progressive Conservative government’s 2023 budget is exactly what one would expect from a party fighting for its political life seven months before a scheduled election.

It’s chock-full of heavy spending in health care, education, justice and most other departments. It includes significant tax relief and tax credits. It has something for everyone. It is, as predicted, the Hail Mary of all Hail Mary budgets.

Overall, it’s a decent budget. It has the right mix of investments in key areas while providing Manitobans with tax relief (although the fact government is borrowing $363 million to pay for tax cuts is troubling). The budget isn’t balanced, but government is reducing the size of the deficit. Government’s debt-to-GDP ratio — an important metric bond-rating agencies consider when setting the province’s credit rating — is back to pre-pandemic levels.

But this is an election year and the budget has to be viewed through that lens. The Tories are desperate to turn their electoral fortunes around. This fiscal blueprint is not what Manitobans could expect from the PCs if they were given a third mandate. For that, Manitobans would have to look to previous budgets, including party leader Heather Stefanson’s first budget as premier last year.

In it, the Tories opted for tax cuts over adequate funding in health care, education and other front-line services. They accelerated plans to balance the books at almost any cost and at the expense of front-line services. The result: for the sixth consecutive year, funding for hospitals, schools, child-care centres, post-secondary institutions and municipalities was either cut, frozen or severely limited.

Stefanson had the opportunity last year to show she was a different leader than her predecessor, former premier Brian Pallister. Instead, she continued his legacy of tax cuts and accelerated deficit reduction over sustainable funding of front-line services. The outcome of that has been well documented. Patients in emergency departments are piling up because they can’t access medical beds, wait times for hospital procedures remain above pre-pandemic levels, municipalities can’t fund basic services and public schools are cutting programs.

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Manitobans will soon have access to $10-a-day child care. But owing to multiple years of operating grant freezes to child-care centres (a cut in real dollars), a severe shortage of qualified daycare staff has caused long wait times for families to access spots for their kids.

That can’t be fixed overnight, nor will it be solved in one budget.

The Tories, under both Pallister and Stefanson, have been obsessed with balancing the books and cutting taxes at the expense of all other things governments should be doing. When the Tories came to power in 2016, they planned to balance the books over two terms. The task of cleaning up the fiscal mess left behind by the previous NDP government (which plunged Manitoba into record debt and deficits during good economic times) was daunting. The Tories told Manitobans they were going to do it slowly and carefully. They proposed a responsible, sustainable fiscal framework that struck the right balance between moving towards a balanced budget and providing front-line services with adequate funding. There was no talk of spending cuts or freezing operating grants.

That changed, soon after the Tories won government. There was a rush to balance the books (which the Tories did in 2020, in half the time originally projected) and they cut myriad taxes, which reduced revenues by more than $2 billion a year. It was ideologically driven and reckless. The cost of tax cuts and accelerated deficit reduction exceeded the benefits.

So now, seven months before an election, the Tories (with the help of massive increases in federal transfer payments) have opened the purse strings like never before. They claim they have changed.

So now, seven months before an election, the Tories (with the help of massive increases in federal transfer payments) have opened the purse strings like never before. They claim they have changed.

“Unlike the budgets of my predecessors, where fiscal responsibility ruled the day, budget 2023 fully reflects the Progressive Conservative roots of our premier,” Finance Minister Cliff Cullen, who is not running in the next election, said in his budget speech.

The problem with that is Cullen and Stefanson are the predecessors.

Stefanson is hoping Manitobans can find it in their hearts to forget the past six years and consider only the present. It’s unlikely she will find a receptive audience.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca

Tom Brodbeck
Columnist

Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.

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