Funding taps expected to open in new Manitoba budget

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This article was published 11/04/2022 (1284 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans should expect the Progressive Conservative government to loosen its grip on the provincial purse strings in Tuesday’s budget, according to a political expert who’s been keeping an eye on them for nearly 60 years.

Premier Heather Stefanson has signalled her intentions with spending announcements and comments in recent weeks — a relaxing of the tight-fisted ways of former premier Brian Pallister, says Paul Thomas, University of Manitoba professor emeritus who worked for Manitoba finance in 1964 helping to prepare budget documents.

The province has recently touted $15 million for long-term care (including infection prevention and control), $7 million for special needs funding across Manitoba’s school divisions, and $7.5 million to expand the Royal Winnipeg Ballet campus.

“In announcing an overall loosening of the purse strings, the government could acknowledge that it went too far, too fast in applying restraint, especially to the health-care system which lacked the resources and resilience to respond to the several waves of the (COVID-19) pandemic,” Thomas said Monday.

The PCs, who are currently stuck behind the NDP in the polls, need to regain the trust of voters who gave them a majority in 2016 and 2019, said Thomas.

However, it may be too late for them in the expected 2023 election, he added.

“There are real limits to how much a governing party can change its image and reputation with voters with a single-day event and a follow-up campaign to publicize all the good things it intends to accomplish,” he said. “Broken bonds of trust with voters are notoriously difficult to repair, and there is little time remaining.”

Going on a spending binge would violate the PC party’s core beliefs about prudent financial management, Thomas said — and Manitobans may not believe what’s promised.

“After years of restraint, (then-)premier Gary Filmon announced combined spending increases and tax cuts but not enough voters believed there was a new budgetary direction, so the PCs were booted from office in 1999,” said Thomas.

Now, multiple sectors affected by PC austerity measures are asking the province to open the funding taps.

Among them, municipalities that have had operating funds frozen since 2016 want a PST rebate so they can quickly invest in much-needed infrastructure projects.

A recent Probe Research poll commissioned by the Association of Manitoba Municipalities found 78 per cent of respondents support such a rebate. It would return to municipalities an estimated $25 million in PST and offset the estimated $91.8 million operating losses suffered in 2021 as a result of the pandemic, the association said in a news release.

Finance Minister Cameron Friesen didn’t make that specific promise Monday.

“AMM knows that we’ve been making very significant infrastructure investments across Manitoba through the investing in Canada infrastructure program and the province’s own infrastructure,” he said at pre-budget media event. “We also know when it comes to transfers to municipalities that we have one of the best deals in Manitoba of any provinces.”

Elsewhere, child care centres whose operating funds have been frozen since 2016 say an increase is needed now with the cost of “everything” going up.

“We’re asking for long-term, consistent, systemic support,” said Jodie Kehl, executive director of the Manitoba Child Care Association. While Manitoba signed onto the federal/provincial Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement last year, the province has not increased operating funds for child care centres, Kehl said in an interview.

The sector has had a hard time recruiting and retaining qualified staff with the wages centres can offer, said Kehl, noting 80 per cent of child care centre costs are associated with salaries.

Stefanson and her cabinet have promised the 2022-23 budget would make life more affordable for Manitobans but haven’t specified how.

The premier has said balancing the budget and reducing the deficit — which in December was forecast at $1.1 billion — will be done gradually by 2028. As the economy rebounds from the pandemic, plans for what to do with the resulting expected increase in provincial revenue haven’t been spelled out, but health care is at the top of the list.

However, the PCs have promised to increase spending on programs but not delivered, said NDP Leader Wab Kinew.

“Like a lot of Manitobans, I simply don’t trust the PC government to get the job done,” Kinew told reporters Monday.

In question period, he pressed Stefanson for a target date for when Manitoba’s surgical and diagnostic testing backlog would be cleared.

The premier didn’t provide a target date, but said the backlog was her government’s “absolute No. 1 priority.”

“There will be more news about this tomorrow,” she said in the house.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca