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Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives say they’ll delay passage of the government’s budget implementation bill until the NDP provides a “meaningful” tax cut.
But Premier Wab Kinew said he’s calling the Opposition’s bluff, and will force the legislature to sit into the summer if it means passing the bill.
On Wednesday, Tory Leader Obby Khan said the budget doesn’t provide enough financial relief.
His party will only pass the budget implementation bill — often referred to as BITSA (the Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act) — if an income tax cut is included, Khan said.
He specifically wants an increase to the basic personal exemption — the amount someone can earn before paying provincial income tax — from the current $15,780 to nearly $21,000.
“The premier talks about pennies [in savings] where we talk about hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, for Manitobans,” Khan said at a Wednesday news conference.
Later in the day, Premier Wab Kinew dared Khan to delay the bill’s passage until the fall.
The Tories’ “ill-advised stunt” would prevent the government from following through on a budget promise to extend the provincial sales tax exemption to all food sold at grocery stores beginning July 1.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew threatened to keep the legislature sitting into the summer in order to pass his budget implementation bill. (Bryce Hoye/CBC)
“If you don’t pass this bill next week, then we’re coming back in June,” Kinew said during question period. “And if you don’t pass it in June, then we’re coming back in July.”
Tory MLAs would then have to spend the summer telling Manitobans why they don’t want them to save money on their groceries, Kinew said.
Khan later said he’d sit in the legislature chamber all summer if needed.
‘Pennies aren’t going to make a difference’: Khan
The Tories admittedly don’t have much leverage. The NDP holds a majority government and can ultimately pass the budget bill without Opposition support.
However, the PCs say they can delay the vote until the fall.
Khan said his party would pass the budget bill this spring if the increase to the basic personal exemption is baked in.
While Khan has previously promised a Tory government would increase the basic personal exemption to $30,000, he argued Wednesday even incremental progress would be better than the NDP’s various affordability measures.
Those have included the planned PST cut on groceries, freezing the price on one-litre containers of milk and a 1.5 cent per litre reduction in the provincial gas tax.
An increase to the basic personal exemption is “the kind of relief Manitobans are looking for” amid a cost of living crisis, Khan said at Wednesday’s news conference.
“Not pennies — not seven cents off a pop can, not 14 cents off a bag of chips, not one and half cents off a litre of gas and not two pennies off a litre of milk,” he said.
“The reality is, pennies aren’t going to make a difference.”
His party estimates the province would forgo at most $350 million in annual revenue if the basic personal exemption was increased to just under $21,000.
Can’t cut tax if bill delayed: NDP
Kinew has suggested his government wouldn’t be able to remove the PST on affected groceries by July 1, as promised in this year’s budget, unless the Tories pass the budget implementation bill.
The Tories argued Wednesday the government can impose tax changes even if the Opposition delays the bill, which happened in 2013 when the then NDP government under Greg Selinger raised the provincial sales tax.
But a provincial government spokesperson said “legal advice has changed throughout the years,” and that advice “is now that the legislation must be passed before a tax change can come into effect.”
The NDP provided an opinion from legislative counsel Wednesday that suggests only tax increases, not decreases, can be enacted without a change in law.
“Increases can be imposed retroactively, and in event the law is not enacted, those who paid the tax can seek refunds,” that document said.
But in the case of a proposed decrease, if the law isn’t enacted, a retailer who failed to collect the original higher amount “will have no recourse to later collect those amounts despite being legally liable to remit the amounts,” the legal opinion said.
That apparently wasn’t the understanding in 2019, when PC premier Brian Pallister said he could cut the PST in advance of passing the legislation enacting it. Kinew, who was the Opposition leader at the time, agreed.
More recently, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government temporarily cut the federal gas tax before the Excise Tax Act was amended.
In Manitoba, the budget implementation bill is put before legislators every year in order to enact measures contained in the budget.
Kinew said Wednesday the bill will be introduced Thursday.
