Premier Greg Selinger Lied plain and simple.
He said during the election he wasn’t going to raise the PST and promised not to raise taxes. In fact, he called the suggestion he would do just that -
“ridiculous” and “non-sense.”
Now, once again, he has broken his promise to not raise taxes. So are you going to let him get away with it or are you going to take action?
We can’t continue to let politicians get away with breaking their election promises and other bad behavior. We have seen countless times in the past how politicians have proposed doing outrageous things, only to back down after enough people spoke out. If enough of us speak out, we can make the Premier back down.
If you don’t believe it, ask Winnipeg’s city council about their proposal to give
$7 million to a hotel company from Alberta to build a water park at the Forks.
Council backed down from that idea pretty quickly after the masses took to the phones, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to tell them it was a bad idea. One councillor, who reversed his support for the proposal, told the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that he had never received so many calls on an issue.
One thing is for certain, Premier Greg Selinger is many things, but he isn’t dumb. He can add up votes and measure public anger just like everyone else. If MLAs in his party also get enough phone calls, they’ll crumble too.
The other thing you can do is sign the petition against the tax hike at
www.GregLied.ca or register to speak at an upcoming committee meeting at the Legislature that is trying to ram through the tax increase. Yes, you’ll get an opportunity to make your presentation in front of the finance minister himself and some of his NDP colleagues who support the tax increase.
One of the things you need to tell the government is they can’t remove your right to vote on the sales tax increase. Manitoba currently has a taxpayer protection law that requires the government to hold a referendum before raising the sales tax. In order to ram through a sales tax increase without a referendum, the NDP are also going to gut that law.
The Selinger government would have you believe they need the extra money from a higher PST to pay for flood costs and other expenses. However, the reality is there is plenty of fat to cut in government.
The NDP could lead by example and reduce the size of cabinet – from 19 down to the
15 members Gary Doer had in his cabinet when he took office in 1999. The government could stop buying Jets tickets, cut its wasteful advertising, put non-essential projects on the backburner and reduce its massive bureaucracy.
As 23% of the bureaucracy is set for retirement over the next five years, reducing the size of government could be easy – just don’t rehire for non-essential positions when bureaucrats retire.
The NDP thought raising the PST would be easier than rolling up their sleeves and cutting government waste. It’s up to you to prove them wrong; breaking major promises should be anything but easy for politicians.
Colin Craig is the Prairie Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
