The deficit in Bokhari’s budgeting

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/03/2016 (3484 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Taxpayers count on their governments figuring it all out, fiscally speaking. That doesn’t mean the numbers match up perfectly, that financial forecasts are spot-on. But it does require that the premier and finance minister have worked hard enough on the details to present a coherent set of expenditures and revenues. You know, where the bottom line, black or red, is the result of basic addition and subtraction.

On Monday, Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari failed Accounting 101. She handed out the tab for her party’s election promises and her projections for another five or six years of deficits. Ms. Bokhari then said the one had nothing to do with the other.

Her platform costing was not included in the proposed string of deficits that, in the abstract, at least, will finance the programs a Liberal government would curb, protect or expand.

The NDP was quick off the mark to howl at the political and financial incompetence of a neophyte politician who has made a career, so far, of telling people not to try pinning her down on the details taxpayers should expect to form the foundation of prudent, predictable government. There’s some irony in this. Team Selinger has made an art out explaining away its history of blowing budgets and financial forecasts, along with a string of targeted dates to get back to balanced.

But Ms. Bokhari was not tripped up by the fine points, or a slippery decimal mark. She simply laid out a plan that made no sense and then left it to everyone else to do their own math on what the finances of the province could look like after a term of Liberal management.

So, here it is: based on revenues rising four per cent and keeping all department budgets, except health, at about two per cent growth, the Liberals projected successive but declining deficits starting this year at $550 million, through to 2019-20, with a small surplus in 2020-21.

But the spreadsheet is a fallacy because none of those numbers accounts for the new spending for Liberal promises, which includes $144 million in the current year alone.

Over five years, the total cost of the promises, the party says, would add up to at least $629 million.

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When questioned, Ms. Bokhari, true to form, insisted those are the numbers, this is the way the Liberals want to present their platform, “people can love it, people can hate it” but there you go. It’s the campaign equivalent of throwing one’s hands over one’s ears and humming loudly.

(Further, Ms. Bokhari Monday could not explain, for example, how she could keep debt-servicing costs to $215 million six years straight even as the debt rose each year. It may be the party is expecting that as old debt is renewed at lower interest rates, savings will be found. Yet, an email to Liberal headquarters Tuesday still elicited no response on the point.)

Voters can opt for change, can invest in hope, but they cannot bank on gibberish.

There can be lots to love in the Liberal platform — first-time homebuyers, Uber enthusiasts and parents of kindergartners are nodding their heads — and the normalization of deficit funding may have desensitized even soft conservatives to rising debt loads. But Manitobans, at least, need the sense the numbers roughly add up and form a plan that, even if pinned on hope, is comprehensible.

Ms. Bokhari’s inability to explain her party’s plan, however, suggests she doesn’t understand it either.