COLUMN: Think Again – Cheaper junk food won’t help struggling families

After several marathon sittings in the Manitoba Legislature, the NDP passed its annual budget last week. According to Premier Wab Kinew, this budget will remove the PST from grocery bills.

However, most grocery products are already PST exempt. The exceptions are soft drinks, snack foods such as potato chips, and take-out meals. These items are generally not considered essential grocery items.

But since this NDP government apparently does consider these items essential, they will now be PST exempt. Initially, this exemption only applied to large grocery chains like Sobeys and not to small mom-and-pop shops.

This didn’t square well with the NDP’s anti-big business rhetoric, so it quickly amended the budget to include smaller stores as well. One thing it did not do was apply the PST exemption to restaurants. What this means is that takeout meals are tax exempt at large grocery chains but still taxed at full price in local restaurants.

When the restaurant industry pointed out the contradiction, Kinew refused to budge. Apparently, his support for ad hoc budget amendments only goes so far.

It’s interesting to hear Kinew and other NDP politicians claim that their budget will help families make ends meet. Perhaps they’re assuming that as Manitobans become more depressed by failing NDP economic policies, it will at least be a tiny bit cheaper to buy comfort food like potato chips. That’s not the kind of bold economic vision that our province needs.

By their own admission taking the PST off junk food amounts to only about $100 in savings per year. The NDP might think that saving $8 per month is all the help Manitobans need, but we know that isn’t enough.

While the NDP gives us pennies back on our grocery bills, it takes hundreds of dollars straight from our pockets. Most notably, the Kinew government ended the indexation of income tax rates, which means that Manitobans lose purchasing power every year as inflation pushes them into a higher tax bracket. It’s called bracket creep, and it’s a sneaky way of raising taxes every year.

In contrast, the PC Party has put forward a bold economic plan to establish a basic personal exemption on income tax of $30,000. That is almost double the current amount of $15,780.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means savings of more than $3,000 per year for the average family of four with two-income earners with a combined income of $60,000 per year or more.

Think of what you could do with an extra $3,000 of your own money. Not only would this generate more economic activity, but it would also mean that families could spend more on their own priorities instead of having the government spend their money elsewhere.

Thus, when the PC Party led a filibuster against the NDP budget, it wasn’t because PC MLAs didn’t want Manitobans to save money. Quite the opposite. The intent was to draw attention to the fact that the NDP budget does little to help struggling families.

Early in his term, Kinew was fond of saying that the economic horse pulls the social cart. Interestingly, we don’t hear this phrase from Kinew nearly as often nowadays. That’s likely because Kinew knows he isn’t doing much to help the economic horse become healthier.

Manitobans deserve more from this government than slightly cheaper junk food. Raising the basic personal exemption on income tax is a much bolder economic policy than tinkering with whether the PST gets charged on specific items.

Given the choice between cheaper junk food and saving more money on every paycheque, I know which one I would choose.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.