Right in the centre - The gap

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Published on Thursday, November 19, 2015

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

There has always been a gap between political promises and political reality. In the recent federal election, the Liberal Party of Canada, led by Justin Trudeau, painted a fairy tale picture for Canadians.

Enough people bought into the tale, that the liberals won a majority government. The Manitoba NDP government went down the same road on Monday with their throne speech. After 16 years in government, they are going to fix everything by spending huge amounts of money. All the while, they claim they will balance the books someday, maybe.

Both governments’ vision of what to do and how to do it are flawed, there’s a big gap. Neither government has a hope of doing what they say they are going to do. The most blatant example for the feds is the refugee situation. As of election day, they promised they would bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year. If even one has come yet, we haven’t heard about it so as of the date of this publication, there’s 46 days until year end. There is no way they can get 25,000 refugees into Canada in 46 days, let alone find a place to put them. Then there is the little problem about finding them work and health care etc, etc. Not left unnoticed by saner minds, such as Brad Wall, Premier of Saskatchewan, is the fact they can’t possibly security screen 25,000 people in that time frame. Security screening is one thing, health status is quite another. The timeline is ridiculous, but it helped get Trudeau elected.

The Selinger government has promised 12,000 day care spots if they can get enough day care workers. What’s the ratio? Five to one? That would be 1,400 additional workers. The NDP is also promising to reduce hospital wait times, build more roads and do everything the City of Winnipeg could possibly want including high speed public transit and moving the rail yards.

The problem with both levels of government is that they fail to realize that saying a certain thing takes seconds or minutes. Doing that thing may take months, years or even decades. Paying for it takes decades or even life times. It’s a bit like a young couple saying they are going to buy a house. Saying it takes less than a minute. Actually shopping for it and agreeing to buy it may only take a day or a week. Paying for it may take 30 years and some actually fail to get it paid for. It can all be summed up in an old adage, “When all is said and  done, there’s a lot more said than done.”

The single biggest challenge for a government is understanding capacity. How much can be said is virtually limitless. What can be done has restrictions of time and political acceptance. What can be paid for depends on the financial capacity of a government. Capacity can be built up with time, experience and vision.

Our capacity as a province or a country is being restricted by a lack of vision. Vision is much more than spouting off some policy aims like refugee numbers or legalizing pot. Vision is much larger and there is very little vision being put out there by governments. The other big problem is money. How much can a person, a company or a government afford to spend. In Canada’s case and in Manitoba’s case, the public debt is overly restricting our capacity. By incurring debt, we cut off future expansion of capacity because so much of our future income will have to go towards interest payments. 

Lack of vision, not understanding capacity and too much debt are the biggest issues we face. It creates a gap that frustrates everyone.