When it comes to the blame game, Tories should look in the mirror

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This article was published 08/03/2024 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The NDP government is raising taxes. No, the new NDP government is lowering taxes.

For anyone who has tuned into proceedings at the Manitoba legislature in the always important spring sitting, this “yes you did/no you didn’t” back and forth has dominated debate between the new NDP government and the new Progressive Conservative opposition.

In particular, the PC caucus is working diligently to blame the NDP for a recent spate of education property tax increases. For the Tories, the cause-and-effect is a simple matter: the NDP isn’t providing enough baseline funding for 2024-25 and it has triggered huge proposed education tax increases.

“The NDP chose higher taxes at a time when families are struggling with the cost of living,” interim PC Leader Wayne Ewasko alleged at the outset of the sitting’s first question period Wednesday.

As education minister before his government was defeated last fall, Ewasko should know what he is talking about. Unfortunately for the Tories, his allegations ignore a fundamental and inescapable reality: the current proposed property tax increases are the cumulative result of the PC government’s policy on education financing that prioritized tax cuts over investments in schools and staff.

To understand how current tax hikes can be assigned to a former government, we need to look at the numbers.

Even though the budget won’t be tabled till April 2, Premier Wab Kinew’s government has promised to increase total baseline public education funding by more than $93 million — an average increase of 3.4 per cent increase for each school division.

Despite that healthy increase, several school divisions have proposed budgets with significant increases in education property taxes.

For some school divisions, the tax hikes have been positioned as a necessary evil to avoid cuts to staff and programs; in other instances, the increases are tied to program enhancements, including the Louis Riel School Division’s proposal for full-day kindergarten.

What has triggered the Tory outrage is that while some divisions have been able to freeze taxes, others have proposed some rather astronomical increases.

Much of the attention has been paid to the rural Western School Division, which has proposed a 17 per cent increase to the education portion of property taxes. The River East Transcona School Division has proposed a 6.5 per cent increase to stave off $15 million in cuts to staff and programs as the division responds to a significant increase in enrollment.

If these tax increases are not the direct result of current funding from the NDP, what is causing the current appetite for hikes? One must look way back to the beginning of the PC mandate following their 2016 election victory, when three major policies were instituted.

First, the Tories instituted a carrot-and-stick approach to public education financing: a small carrot in the form of meagre annual increases in baseline funding; and a huge stick in the form of financial penalties for divisions that did not agree to freeze property taxes.

Unfortunately, the PC government did not provide adequate baseline funding to help school divisions make ends meet. As was the case in health care and grants to municipalities, total funding for education went up modestly each year but not nearly enough to account for the inflation and an increase to student numbers.

Second, while it was starving school divisions, the PC government spent hundreds of millions in education property tax rebates to property owners, a bold policy that did not provide a single additional dollar of money for the operation of schools.

Finally, the Tories delayed and ignored their obligations to negotiate new contracts with teachers and other education support workers. After failing to institute a legislated public-sector-wide wage freeze, the Tories chose instead to let contracts lapse, which triggered years of retroactive pay.

The result was that at a time when the province and school divisions faced a huge liability for wage settlements, the PC government was starving schools of operating money and giving away hundreds of millions in rebates.

The cumulative effect of Tory policies was a pent-up need for more money in public education, and no place to go other than property owners.

Blaming the NDP for the property tax increases is a difficult task, indeed.

Ewasko and other Tory critics are likely operating on the basis the average property owner will not remember the years of austerity that led up to this year’s proposed tax hikes. It’s certainly a well-documented political phenomenon for citizens to blame the government of the day for any and all problems, even when the problem can be traced to a former government.

On the other hand, just about everyone involved in public education — and when you consider number of teachers, support workers, trustees, that’s a lot of people — will know how and why some divisions are prompted to hike taxes.

They will know who deserves the blame.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com