Election budget
Opposition MLA Brad Trivers thinks spending in budget a sign of early election
With all the spending planned in the government’s latest budget, Opposition finance critic Brad Trivers says it looks like a government getting ready for an early election. Trivers said he wondered why the government didn’t make any of the announcements that were in the budget some time over the last three years. “The cynic in me thinks that perhaps a flurry of good news announcements like this in a budget is a sign that there may be a writ dropped sometime in the near future,” he said. Finance Minister Heath MacDonald’s budget projects a $1.5-million surplus and a string of new spending initiatives including tax breaks, funding for post-secondary students and more money for health care.
Trivers said there are a lot of commitments in the budget and he was concerned about whether or not the government would actually follow through on them.
“We’ve seen them make promises before and then not follow through.” Included in the tax cuts was a reduction in the small business tax by 0.5 per cent, and Trivers said he would have liked to see the government cut it by more.
“I think our businesses find it hard to compete,” he said. Green finance critic Hannah Bell said the government called the budget “Investing in Islanders” and talked a lot about how well the economy is doing.
Bell said she would have like to see more direct spending and support for poverty reduction.
“There’s been an awful lot of work on strategy and not a lot of action outcomes.”
She said something like bigger increases to food and shelter allowances for social assistance clients would have been a “quick win” the Greens could have supported.
There were some great initiatives in the budget, Bell said, including an increase to the basic personal tax exemption and support for post-secondary students
“It’s a very broad sprinkling of worthy programs that have been supported.”
Bell said one area of concern is the reliance on money from the federal government, which is not sustainable.
“Definitely the (budget) debate is going to be critical.”