Picking cherries and taking credit: Tories attempt to reshape legacy in year-end claims

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/01/2025 (451 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was an unusual year-end message from Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative party.

Last week, the Opposition Tories issued a press release arguing that all, or most, of the good things Manitobans enjoyed from the provincial government in 2024 — including tax cuts — was the doing of the previous Progressive Conservative government.

It’s not a “regular occurrence” for a political party that lost an election a year earlier to claim credit for current government activity, said University of Manitoba political studies professor emeritus Paul Thomas, a longtime expert on Manitoba and national politics.

But it was an attempt to change the narrative on the Tories’ record in government, which included cuts to front-line services, widespread fiscal austerity measures and a sizable provincial deficit.

“In this instance, it is meant to remind Manitobans that not everything about the (former premiers Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson’s) period was negative,” Thomas said.

According to the Tories, Manitobans can thank the previous government for lower income taxes in 2024, the expansion of the Selkirk Regional Health Centre, the hiring of more health-care workers this year, the opening of a new school in Morden and work on a new personal-care home in Lac du Bonnet.

The Tories also claimed credit for the hiring of new Winnipeg Transit safety officers, new infrastructure at the Port of Churchill and the Canadian Premium Sands project, which interim PC Leader Wayne Ewasko said in an interview the Tories laid the groundwork for in 2019.

Those are not necessarily inaccurate claims. But they fall well short of a comprehensive assessment of the PC’s time in office.

If the Tories want to remind Manitobans that it was their party that brought in $1.6 billion of annual tax cuts (including an increase to the personal exemption on income taxes and a cut to the education property tax), they also have to take responsibility for how that loss of taxation revenue has impacted the province’s bottom line. The Tories left behind a $2-billion deficit and a provincial net debt that hit record levels.

While it’s true some of the new health-care workers hired in 2024 were the result of spending plans announced by the previous government, it came after several years of funding cuts to regional health authorities that resulted in widespread layoffs of front-line staff.

The Tories may have provided financial assistance to the City of Winnipeg to hire safety officers on buses, but that came after several years of funding freezes to municipalities, which had a devastating impact on city finances.

The Tories also ended the province’s 50-50 funding agreement with Winnipeg Transit, resulting in the deterioration of transit services and higher fares.

It’s true the Tories made infrastructure investments in the Port of Churchill. But the PC’s underspent the province’s infrastructure budget — some years by hundreds of millions of dollars — virtually every year they were in government from 2016 to 2023.

The Tories can cherry-pick aspects of their record in government all they want in an attempt to rewrite history.

But it doesn’t change the fact that they did considerable damage to the province’s health-care system — which will take years to fix — and saddled the incoming NDP government with a deficit that will likely take more than one term in office to eliminate.

No government is “all bad,” including the previous PC government. But if the Tories want to remind Manitobans of their time in office, they should provide a more complete list of their record.