Focus on politics behind budget speech

Opinion

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This article was published 07/03/2023 (914 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This year’s Manitoba budget speech isn’t really about spending plans for the upcoming fiscal year. It’s about forcing voters to choose between having more money in their pockets or less.

This budget isn’t aimed at committed NDP, Liberal or Green Party supporters. The target audience is the quarter-million voters who marked their ballots for Progressive Conservative candidates in the 2019 election.

And this budget isn’t about a long-term vision for the province. It’s about survival and self-preservation. It’s about MLAs, staffers and appointees keeping their jobs. It’s about hanging on to the levers of power that dictate the direction of our province.

Keep those points in mind as you read or listen to today’s provincial speech, or reports and analysis of the various commitments contained in it.

In my previous life as a political staffer, I wrote three provincial budget speeches and edited a fourth. I also participated in the drafting and editing of the technical documents related to those four budgets.

Based on those experiences, I read budget speeches through political and economic lenses. I evaluate the structure and word choices in each speech, along with the spending plans for each department, in order to discern the political objectives the speech is attempting to accomplish and the narrative it seeks to create in order to achieve those goals.

When Finance Minister Cliff Cullen rises to deliver his budget speech this afternoon, it should be easy for Manitobans to understand what he wants to accomplish and the spin he’s using to get there.

Let’s start with obvious objective of this budget: it’s nothing less than the re-election of the Stefanson government. Failing that, the “fall-back” goal is ensuring as many PC candidates are elected as possible in order to give the party a reasonable chance of just one term on the opposition benches.

With the government far behind the NDP in public opinion polls, how can today’s budget speech accomplish that objective? Cullen will likely use a narrative that focuses on the challenges many Manitobans are experiencing in finding enough money to feed their families, pay their bills and make ends meet.

Indeed, government house leader Kelvin Goertzen hinted at that strategy last week, when he told this newspaper: “I think people will see many things that they like and it will deal with a lot of issues that people have concerns about, not the least of which is affordability.”

You hear the word “affordability” a lot lately because polling data shows it resonates with a large percentage of voters who are concerned about the impact of inflation, rising interest rates and higher taxes. The word ranks right up there with phrases such as “tax fairness” and “value for money.”

Similarly, polls have shown for decades that voters often say they are concerned about issues such as health care, crime and education, but that their economic self-interest is consistently the top factor in determining which candidate they vote for.

Viewed from that perspective, the government’s likely strategy seems obvious. Today’s budget speech will include significant new spending on health care and education, but its real focus will be on convincing voters the Tories are the only party that understands the economic challenges Manitobans are dealing with, and the only party that won’t make their lives even harder by raising their taxes.

As part of that pitch, the speech could announce more licence and fee reductions, another round of “affordability cheques,” and perhaps the permanent elimination of the education tax portion of property tax bills. There could even be a promise to implement the one per cent PST cut that was promised but postponed because of the pandemic.

Those types of commitments would likely anger NDP, Liberal and Green Party supporters, but they never intended to vote for Tory candidates anyway. Rather, the budget speech’s mission is to remind Manitobans who voted for PC candidates in 2016 and 2019 that the government has kept its promise to lower taxes and deliver greater value for their tax dollars, and will continue to do so.

If Cullen can make that case to those voters, the result of the next election could be closer than many expect.

Deveryn Ross is a political commentator living in Brandon.

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