The Demo Site

The NDP's 8% Solution...

The Manitoba NDP will push the provincial sales tax to eight per cent July 1.

But first they need to make it legal.

Under current law, the NDP needs the permission of Manitobans in a referendum to raise the sales tax, but in the coming days Premier Greg Selinger's New Democrats will introduce legislation to do away with that requirement.

It's the second time in three years the NDP will rewrite the province's balanced-budget legislation to legalize its fiscal plan. The first time was in 2010 when the NDP said it had to run multi-year deficits because of the ravages of the 2008 recession.

"We'll be accountable for that," Selinger told reporters Tuesday after Finance Minister Stan Struthers tabled his second budget as finance minister. "We have to get on with it now. The construction season is in front of us. The flood risk is in front of us as we speak. It's time to move on and get these things done."

The one percentage point sales-tax hike is the main pocketbook hit for Manitobans in a draconian budget that also makes it more expensive to smoke cigarettes, buy a fishing licence (up $5.00), and signals a 40-cent rise to the $10.25 minimum wage this fall, (that will cripple small business and likely cause massive job losses).

Selinger and His government are in such atrocious financial shape — due to years of horrendous fiscal mismanagement — that he’s now willing to stoop as low as to expunge the only legal authority taxpayers have left to protect their personal assets.

Selinger and his NDP government are proposing to raise the PST to 8% from 7%. It would be the single biggest tax increase since the NDP increased the PST in 1987 to 7% from 6%. A year later, then-NDP premier Howard Pawley was forced to resign after his 1988 budget was defeated by his own party and the New Democrats were thrown out of office.

Let's hope that occurs again before these horrendous new taxes and their small business destroying 40% minimum wage increase completely collapses the Province.