Dewar’s 1st budget

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/04/2015 (3820 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If he hasn’t been already I would expect rookie Finance Minister Greg Dewar to be burning the midnight oil over the next week.

Next Thursday (April 30) is B Day for Dewar and the Selinger government.

The relatively untested Dewar presents his first budget first to media in the budget lockup and then in the House in his budget speech.

Dewar has been an MLA since 1990 and has had several responsibilities over the years, including being his party’s whip. There was also an attempt to have him elected as the House speaker, but he lost out to Daryl Reid.

The Selkirk MLA was only promoted (or thrust) to cabinet last Nov. 3 at the height of the NDP caucus rebellion.

Earlier in the day five cabinet ministers resigned their posts in protest over Premier Greg Selinger’s leadership.

Included in that was then finance minister Jennifer Howard and her predecessor Stan Struthers, who was at the time the minister responsible for municipal government and Manitoba Hydro.

In a blink of an eye Dewar became Selinger’s fourth finance minister since he became premier in 2009 after former premier Gary Doer resigned to be Canada’s ambassador to the United States. Former finance minister and Selinger ally Rosann Wowchuk resigned for personal reasons in 2011.

Next Thursday all eyes will be on Dewar to see how he performs, and more importantly, thinks on his feet to not only to repeat NDP talking points, but to answer some expected tough questions on how the New Democrats are managing the province’s economy and controlling the public purse.

Dewar has already hinted that his first budget will have a plan to show Manitobans how the government will be out of deficit. The working deadline is by 2017, but it’s expected Dewar will talk about how that will possible with continuing pressures on health care, education, family services and corrections.

The NDP have run deficit budgets since 2009 in part in response to that year’s recession.

All eyes will also be on Dewar budget day because he will be the point person for the NDP to show us that the party has put its leadership feud behind it and is ready to govern again.

It’s no secret to those in the bureaucracy and for those who do regular business with government, like our Crown corporations, that precious little got done during the insurrection.

Dewar also has to perform well in the days after during the budget debate in the house. And in estimates, the sometimes grueling process where the opposition gets to grill ministers on departmental spending and policy. Any slip and it quicky ends up on Twitter.

Put it all together, Dewar’s performance will be more important than his boss’s in the coming days and weeks.