It’s no surprise the Selinger government continues to fall in public opinion polls after the NDP drove the province’s finances further into the ground in 2015, triggering a credit rating downgrade from one bond rating agency and a stern warning from another.
Apparently these guys just don’t get it.
Despite a year of cautionary words from credit rating agencies, the business community and others that the provincial government can no longer operate on borrowed money and a high-tax regime, the NDP continued to thumb its nose at Manitobans by tabling its seventh straight deficit budget this year while delaying a return to balance budgets until at least 2018-19.
And the public has taken notice.
According to the most recent Probe Research poll, the NDP’s popularity dropped to 25%, down from 29% in June. It’s the lowest showing for the NDP in a Probe Research quarterly poll ever and it’s dangerously close to the 23.6% overall support the party got when it was decimated in the 1988 provincial election.
Just like in the late 1980s, Manitoba voters have become disenchanted with the NDP’s high-tax, deficit-financing ways. And it appears they’re now ready to throw them out of office, just like they did 27 years ago.
Not only is the party at rock-bottom in the polls — hanging on to what’s left of its core NDP support, largely in the city of Winnipeg — Premier Greg Selinger’s personal popularity is also falling.
According to an Angus Reid Institute poll in August, Selinger was again ranked the least popular premier in Canada. And his numbers have been falling steadily, even well after government announced the PST increase in 2013, which suggests it isn’t the tax hike alone that’s responsible for the NDP’s current woes.
The government’s overall mismanagement of the province’s finances, including the tax hike, appears to be the driving force behind its plummeting support.
Sure, the internal caucus feud and the failed coup on Selinger over the past year hasn’t helped the NDP’s image with the public. It shows a party in disarray that lacks the political stability to effectively govern. But the main grievance against the NDP isn’t the political drama playing out in the NDP caucus room. People don’t care much about the partisan goings-on of political parties. What they do care about is how much they’re paying in taxes and what they’re getting in return for those taxes. The public actually pays attention when government compromises the integrity of the provincial treasury through unsustainable spending and skyrocketing debt.
And that concern is showing up in the polls.
Since Probe’s last poll, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the NDP government’s credit rating in July. Last month, DBRS, one of three major bond rating agencies that rate the province’s creditworthiness, said the NDP’s “weak fiscal discipline” has led to delays in balancing the books and that its “fiscal outlook continues to disappoint.”
Stories like these are not lost on the public. And coupled with the NDP’s high-tax regime and poor social and economic outcomes, it’s no wonder the government continues to fall in the polls. Despite all the spending, the deficits, the increased debt and the high taxes, Manitoba still has the highest child poverty rates in Canada, some of the worst health care outcomes in the country and ranks dead last in national public school testing for Grade 8 students. The big-government, socialist experiment isn’t working.
This isn’t just about Greg Selinger, either. The entire NDP caucus has supported every one of the premier’s fiscal policies. In fact, many have participated in their formulation.
This trainwreck has been a group effort.
And the group is about to go down.
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Has Notley taken a stance on anything? There hasn't been a week gone by that she hasn't opened her yap and a day later had to "clarify" what she said by further riding the fence or delaying an actual response. It's making things worse, investment in this province is sitting on their wallets, and that CAN be blamed on the NDP.
