Tories taking careful steps to eliminate deficit

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/03/2018 (2766 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The envelope landed with a thud on the desk, though it contained no more than a sheet or two of purple paper.

That’s right — purple — so the Treasury Board memo inside would be impossible to misplace.

First to cabinet ministers and then to their deputies, the envelopes were “walked around” the marble-floored halls of the legislative building, signifying the urgency and importance of the hand delivery.

Each contained a number known as a departmental “target” that caused even some of the most experienced to pause.

And so began — nearly 10 months ago — the planning process for the 2018 budget that was tabled on Monday.

Importantly, it was the earliest that any government of any stripe at any point in Manitoba history had begun the search to secure budget savings and to slow the growth in spending.

And the Pallister government needed every single planning week it could get.

Still facing a massive 2016-17 deficit of $764 million, largely inherited from the NDP, Finance Minister Cameron Friesen had the monumental task of inching the massive machinery of government another step forward, toward the goal of a one-point reduction in the PST by the end of its first term and a balanced budget by the end of the second.

By circumstance, Minister Friesen was the victim of a rushed process in his first budget, which was tabled just a few weeks after the April 2016 election.

Even during the 2017 budget process, the message to “do more with less” hadn’t quite gotten through, so ideas were put forward that were not quite well enough thought out, wouldn’t save money, or would fail to contain growth in spending.

So the schoolteacher part of our finance minister knew he had to give everyone across government more time to develop comprehensive proposals to help him bend the cost curve and achieve fiscal sustainability.

That’s simple household code for, “Don’t spend more than you make and when you do spend, set careful priorities” to slow annual growth from the unaffordable five per cent range down to the neighbourhood of two.

This time, no one doubted the seriousness of the task at hand or the laser focus of the Pallister government. In the 2016 election campaign, they promised what they believed they could deliver and, ever since, have been singularly intent on delivering on what they promised.

But not at any cost, despite what the myth-filled union TV ad campaigns would have you believe.

Over nearly a year, cabinet ministers and their officials marched back and forth to Treasury Board — during three different rounds — to brainstorm, examine and rework, before finalizing the plans that were set before Manitobans on Monday.

That level of careful, detailed planning must be applauded, especially after more than a decade of NDP mismanagement that left the entire Pallister government with a lot to catch up on.

Never forget the mess they inherited from the NDP, which doubled the debt, hiked taxes and fees and drove the deficit through the roof, leaving Manitoba with a credit-rating downgrade that forced critically needed dollars to be wasted on higher interest rates.

The fact Friesen came in well under his own deficit projections — by about $114 million — and began providing some tax relief while still giving modest increases to departments (enough to expand ER capacity and build five badly needed new schools) didn’t happen by chance.

On Monday, a political hole-in-one was scored by a cast of thousands across government who all put “shoulder to wheel” to help Manitoba get another step closer to achieving a huge turnaround that no one considered even close to feasible just two years ago.

But, technically speaking, that was last year — and I can say with certainty that budget planning for 2019 will get under way even earlier this year.

In fact, all signs point to envelopes and memos — red this time — being distributed in the next few weeks because, as the premier recently said, this is a year-round, every-year process until the budget is balanced.

On that day in the not-so-distant future, when Manitoba is back in the operating black, perhaps that will be the colour of the memo, signifying that fiscal success has finally been achieved.

Barbara Biggar served as a senior adviser to former premier Gary Filmon and is currently the president and CEO of Biggar Ideas, a communications consulting firm in Manitoba.