Manitoba looks ready to switch back to the NDP, something that won’t bode well for its citizens, its prairie neighbours or the country..It’s common for the electorate to switch teams after two terms and give the other group a try. But this is one time the seven-year itch should be ignored..Manitobans have made this choice before. The NDP ruled from 2001 to 2016 before the PCs got two terms. The province was nine years behind Saskatchewan, which had 16 years of NDP rule that ended in 2007. Saskatchewan isn’t looking back, either. Two weeks ago, Angus Reid found Scott Moe tied as the premier with the highest approval rating: 50%..Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson is at the bottom with 28%, tied with Doug Ford and remains both lowly rated and underrated. She inherited a political disaster from outgoing premier Brian Pallister worse than Danielle Smith did from Jason Kenney..Pallister will be forever remembered as the Grinch who stole pandemic Christmas..He banned in-store shopping for two months starting at the end of November 2020 and didn’t lift it for two months. Small business heard its death knell before Christmas bells rang, their prime sales season robbed by their own premier..After Pallister implemented a QR code digital vaccine passport, his time was up and he knew it. He announced his resignation August 10, 2021. Deputy Premier Stefanson put her name forward eight days later and won the leadership October 30..The Winnipeg MLA was expected to run away with the contest, but her competitor Shelley Glover campaigned hard with an appeal to party members opposed to pandemic restrictions. Stefanson won with just 51% of the party vote. This left her as the damaged leader of a fractured party, a heap of ruins that no man and only one other woman was willing to preside over.Although the Manitoba PCs had 35 seats when the legislature rose, 12 sitting PC MLAs aren’t running again. That leaves 23 PC incumbents, which means six newcomers have to win to get a 29 seat-majority. The party is polling very well in rural areas but trails in Winnipeg where most of the votes are..New premier or not, Stefanson was not shy to chair the Council of the Federation. Even better, Manitoba had the third-highest GDP growth in Canada last year. That’s pretty good for a prairie province under a Trudeau government..After initial caution, Stefanson warmed up to making Churchill the conduit for western energy exports. With Ottawa looking more like Mordor by the day, a prairie alliance is crucial..For this election, the Progressive Conservatives have abandoned the progressive for the conservative..The PCs are offering $1.8 billion worth of tax cuts, including a substantial income tax reduction and eliminating carbon pricing on power bills. Right-leaning voters found something better to get behind than “not NDP.” As for the wary left, they warned Manitoba would fall into a fiscal abyss and public services with it..This socialist perspective ignores how low taxes stimulate growth. Even the NDP Saskatchewan government in the 2000’s stumbled onto this with personal and business tax reductions where revenues grew. After Brad Wall and the Sask Party took the reins in 2007, they finished the job with education property tax reductions. Population and property values soared as the province became what it always should have been..Stefanson also wants to phase out education property taxes over ten years, a proposal dismissed by opponents in the televised debate as a tax break for billionaires..Actually it is a matter of justice. More than half of Manitoba’s population lives in that tax-revenue gobbling public sector hub known as Winnipeg. That farmers should fund so much of the school bill is just plain wrong..The PCs deserve credit for curtailing the growth of its provincial bureaucracy..This author compared total provincial government admin wages paid in August 2015 and August 2023 and found only a 5.8% increase, much less than the 8.8% increase in the working-age population and the 41.7% average across Canadian provinces..However, the job remains undone..Pay to provincial government workers accounts for 2.3% of all wages and salaries in Manitoba, versus an average of 2% in the rest of Canada..At 15%, Manitoba has the highest percentage of any province for wages paid to health and social service workers, far more than the 10.8% national average. Education takes 10% of Manitoba wages versus 7% in the average Canadian province..This means the private sector has to get a lot bigger relative to the public sector, something tax cuts will help facilitate. This doesn’t help the power of the unions and the NDP, of course. A PC government can tell the public unions tax cuts have already increased their take-home pay, so their wage hikes will be all the more modest..Unfortunately, all these facts, good policy and sensibility may be lost in the chatter and rhetoric..Some activists want a Manitoba landfill to be searched for two indigenous ladies’ remains, something a feasibility study said would take anywhere between $84 million and $184 million. The activists are blockading the landfill as the election approaches..Only in Manitoba could two dead people possibly in one landfill tip sway the politics of 1.4 million people living in a 647,797 sq. km. area. Thank God lockdowns aren’t an issue, as both the NDP and PCs have promised never again..Recently Manitoba PCs endorsed a policy to solidify the role of parents in education. The significance of this action was even noted in a Zoom call by the Ontario Federation of Labour as it co-ordinated opposition to the million-person march. Whereas the PCs want to put the brakes on wokeness, an NDP government would floor the gas pedal..Perhaps a last-minute miracle can prevent Manitoba from going orange, woke, and broke. A miracle is what it will take.
Manitoba looks ready to switch back to the NDP, something that won’t bode well for its citizens, its prairie neighbours or the country..It’s common for the electorate to switch teams after two terms and give the other group a try. But this is one time the seven-year itch should be ignored..Manitobans have made this choice before. The NDP ruled from 2001 to 2016 before the PCs got two terms. The province was nine years behind Saskatchewan, which had 16 years of NDP rule that ended in 2007. Saskatchewan isn’t looking back, either. Two weeks ago, Angus Reid found Scott Moe tied as the premier with the highest approval rating: 50%..Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson is at the bottom with 28%, tied with Doug Ford and remains both lowly rated and underrated. She inherited a political disaster from outgoing premier Brian Pallister worse than Danielle Smith did from Jason Kenney..Pallister will be forever remembered as the Grinch who stole pandemic Christmas..He banned in-store shopping for two months starting at the end of November 2020 and didn’t lift it for two months. Small business heard its death knell before Christmas bells rang, their prime sales season robbed by their own premier..After Pallister implemented a QR code digital vaccine passport, his time was up and he knew it. He announced his resignation August 10, 2021. Deputy Premier Stefanson put her name forward eight days later and won the leadership October 30..The Winnipeg MLA was expected to run away with the contest, but her competitor Shelley Glover campaigned hard with an appeal to party members opposed to pandemic restrictions. Stefanson won with just 51% of the party vote. This left her as the damaged leader of a fractured party, a heap of ruins that no man and only one other woman was willing to preside over.Although the Manitoba PCs had 35 seats when the legislature rose, 12 sitting PC MLAs aren’t running again. That leaves 23 PC incumbents, which means six newcomers have to win to get a 29 seat-majority. The party is polling very well in rural areas but trails in Winnipeg where most of the votes are..New premier or not, Stefanson was not shy to chair the Council of the Federation. Even better, Manitoba had the third-highest GDP growth in Canada last year. That’s pretty good for a prairie province under a Trudeau government..After initial caution, Stefanson warmed up to making Churchill the conduit for western energy exports. With Ottawa looking more like Mordor by the day, a prairie alliance is crucial..For this election, the Progressive Conservatives have abandoned the progressive for the conservative..The PCs are offering $1.8 billion worth of tax cuts, including a substantial income tax reduction and eliminating carbon pricing on power bills. Right-leaning voters found something better to get behind than “not NDP.” As for the wary left, they warned Manitoba would fall into a fiscal abyss and public services with it..This socialist perspective ignores how low taxes stimulate growth. Even the NDP Saskatchewan government in the 2000’s stumbled onto this with personal and business tax reductions where revenues grew. After Brad Wall and the Sask Party took the reins in 2007, they finished the job with education property tax reductions. Population and property values soared as the province became what it always should have been..Stefanson also wants to phase out education property taxes over ten years, a proposal dismissed by opponents in the televised debate as a tax break for billionaires..Actually it is a matter of justice. More than half of Manitoba’s population lives in that tax-revenue gobbling public sector hub known as Winnipeg. That farmers should fund so much of the school bill is just plain wrong..The PCs deserve credit for curtailing the growth of its provincial bureaucracy..This author compared total provincial government admin wages paid in August 2015 and August 2023 and found only a 5.8% increase, much less than the 8.8% increase in the working-age population and the 41.7% average across Canadian provinces..However, the job remains undone..Pay to provincial government workers accounts for 2.3% of all wages and salaries in Manitoba, versus an average of 2% in the rest of Canada..At 15%, Manitoba has the highest percentage of any province for wages paid to health and social service workers, far more than the 10.8% national average. Education takes 10% of Manitoba wages versus 7% in the average Canadian province..This means the private sector has to get a lot bigger relative to the public sector, something tax cuts will help facilitate. This doesn’t help the power of the unions and the NDP, of course. A PC government can tell the public unions tax cuts have already increased their take-home pay, so their wage hikes will be all the more modest..Unfortunately, all these facts, good policy and sensibility may be lost in the chatter and rhetoric..Some activists want a Manitoba landfill to be searched for two indigenous ladies’ remains, something a feasibility study said would take anywhere between $84 million and $184 million. The activists are blockading the landfill as the election approaches..Only in Manitoba could two dead people possibly in one landfill tip sway the politics of 1.4 million people living in a 647,797 sq. km. area. Thank God lockdowns aren’t an issue, as both the NDP and PCs have promised never again..Recently Manitoba PCs endorsed a policy to solidify the role of parents in education. The significance of this action was even noted in a Zoom call by the Ontario Federation of Labour as it co-ordinated opposition to the million-person march. Whereas the PCs want to put the brakes on wokeness, an NDP government would floor the gas pedal..Perhaps a last-minute miracle can prevent Manitoba from going orange, woke, and broke. A miracle is what it will take.