Pallister won’t say if income test in the cards for property-tax credit

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This article was published 26/10/2017 (2960 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister wouldn’t rule out Thursday applying some form of income-testing in his next budget to the $343.3-million education property-tax credit.

It’s the most obvious pot of money available to bring down the provincial spending and deficit — a massive amount of money that gives homeowners and tenants a maximum $700 off the bottom of their annual property-tax bills.

NDP Leader Wab Kinew repeatedly pressed Pallister in the premier’s estimates hearing Thursday to divulge if the money is on the table.

Kinew pointed out that KPMG cited the credit as ready cash in its enormous value-for-money audit of the province’s finances, but Pallister refused to bite.

The closest Kinew came to getting an answer was Pallister saying, “Well, yeah, we’ll look at that,” as he grumbled about how Kinew seized on one mention of the credit in a huge report that documented the NDP’s role in handing the Tories a financial mess.

“We inherited a social mess, and we inherited an economic development mess,” Pallister told Kinew. “We’ve got a massive fiscal challenge. For five years, the (NDP) government not only had a massive deficit, it underestimated it.”

Reminded later that the Tories floated trial balloons on the tax credit a year ago before leaving it alone in their budget, Pallister several times avoided saying he has ruled out income-testing.

Instead, he emphasized in an interview that the Conservatives need to get their books in order while helping lower-income Manitobans.

“We have to recognize Manitobans have endured some of the largest tax hikes in the last few years under the NDP,” the premier said. “The nature of the various taxes the NDP hiked in the last few years disproportionately hurt the lower-income category.

“We’ve tried to be progressive in all our changes to make sure our lower-income families are not facing additional challenges. We’re really trying to make sure we give additional comfort to those folks who are struggling to make ends meet. We want to make sure we leave more money on the kitchen table for those folks… (through) progressive policies that assist people to make their way up in the world.”

The premier said he doesn’t want people to anticipate “additional tax measures,” but said he recognizes that the EPTC is a credit that reduces the property taxes already levied by municipal councils and school boards.

“We can’t keep on borrowing $2 million to $3 million every single day. We’ve got to get our fiscal situation restored,” Pallister said.

The premier said he had not been aware that the NDP rebranded the property tax credit in 2005 as education funding, even though none of the money goes into a classroom. Until then, it had been a straightforward credit on property taxes.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca