Manitoba·AnalysisTwo years into Wab Kinew’s inaugural term as Manitoba’s premier, it’s now fair to use the word implausible to describe his 2023 campaign pledge to eliminate the provincial deficit within a single term.While voters may allow more time to ‘fix health care’ and reduce homelessness, the zero-deficit quest is lostBartley Kives · CBC News · Posted: Oct 03, 2025 6:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 6 hours agoFinance Minister Adrien Sala, who used a hardhat as a prop on budget day this year, no longer has a clear path to pave toward a balanced budget. (Jaison Empson/CBC)Two years to the day since Manitobans voted in the NDP, Wab Kinew remains almost as popular as ever even though the rookie premier has yet to fulfil his most ambitious promises.The NDP government’s promised fix for health care remains elusive, as emergency-room wait times lengthen along with surgical wait lists.Given that Kinew and his NDP colleagues did not elucidate a concrete plan to improve health care during the 2023 election campaign — the rote response at the time to questions about how health care would be fixed was a pledge to “listen to front-line health-care workers” — it’s fair to suggest the task of improving Manitoba’s massive and complex health-care system requires more thoughtful work, over a longer period of time.Similarly, the Kinew NDP’s campaign promise to end chronic homelessness has also become arduous. More people are now living on the streets of Winnipeg than at any other time since surveys started in 2015.While there’s no reason to doubt the good intentions of the provincial homelessness strategy, it is unreasonable to expect this government to quickly reverse the tide of decades of growing socio-economic inequality in a society where misery has become so commonplace, it would outrage earlier generations.Politically, the lack of movement on health-care and homelessness is unlikely to prove fatal for the NDP in the short term. Even as North American society grows increasingly uncivil, voters on the Canadian side of the border may still be perceived as rational creatures who don’t expect miracles from incoming governments.This does not mean voters are likely to appreciate it when elected officials underestimate their intelligence by promising something utterly implausible, as opposed to something very difficult, such as fixing health care, or something aspirational, like ending homelessness.Two years into Kinew’s inaugural term as Manitoba’s premier, it’s now fair to use the word implausible to describe his 2023 campaign pledge to eliminate the provincial deficit within a single term.This pledge appeared to be entirely possible two years ago. Toward the end of Heather Stefanson’s brief period as premier, provincial accountants determined Manitoba ended the 2022-23 fiscal year with a $373-million surplus.Balancing the budget again within two years no longer seems plausible because the NDP government followed the PC fiscal performance with two successive deficits, each in excess of $1 billion.More importantly, the Kinew government does not appear to be making any actual headway toward eliminating future deficits.A simple glance at the public accounts makes this apparent. At the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year, Manitoba reported a $1.971-billion deficit. This figure was inflated by a decision to book a $530-million legal settlement over money withheld from child-and-family services in March 2024, the final month of that fiscal year, well before the actual expense was incurred by the province.Remove the CFS settlement and the 2023-24 deficit would have been $1.441 billion — and the most recent year’s deficit would have been higher.Instead, the 2024-25 fiscal year in Manitoba ended with an official deficit of $1.165 billion. But there are other reasons this pool of red ink must also be taken with a grain of salt.For starters, the province booked another unfavourable legal claim in 2024-25 well before the bill comes due. This unfavourable expense involves yet yet another lawsuit within the families department, Finance Minister Adrien Sala said last week.While Sala wouldn’t say precisely how much money the province set aside to cover off this tab, it’s likely in hundreds of millions. We know this because the provincial families department went 35 per cent over budget in 2024-25, which worked out to additional spending of $745 million.The fiscal waters were also mudded in 2024-25 due to a windfall on the revenue side. The province booked a $421-million payout from tobacco companies during the most recent fiscal year, thanks to the settlement of a lawsuit over provincial health-care costs.Without this payout, the deficit for 2024-25 would have come in at $1.586 billion.In other words, legal claims for and against the province distort the view of Manitoba’s finances. But even when you remove the claims, the public accounts would still show a nearly billion-dollar chasm between provincial revenue and expenses during the most recent year.This gap is unlikely to close. On the revenue side, there’s little reason to expect growth to exceed very modest economic projections made in the face of trade belligerence from both the United States and China.If anything, Manitoba is under-performing. To cherry-pick one depressing economic metric, this province is not creating more jobs.According to Statistics Canada, full-time employment in Manitoba has barely budged in this province since the NDP was elected.In October 2023, there were 585,900 full-time employees in this province. In August 2025 — the most recent month for which job statistics are available — there were 586,400 full-time employees.That means Manitoba only added 500 more full-time jobs during a nearly two-year span when the provincial population grew by 55,000 people. The gig economy — effectively, more people working multiple jobs with little to no benefits — will not bring prosperity and the tax revenue that comes with it.On the expense side, there is equally little reason to expect spending increases to suddenly slow. While spending on health care only rose 5.6 per cent in 2024-25 compared to the previous year, health care is such a behemoth, that single-department spending hike worked out to an additional $479 million in provincial expenses.That’s what happens in a province where health accounts for 35 cents out of every dollar the government spends.Sala does not see it this way. The finance minister continues to insist Manitoba’s billion-dollar deficit will disappear before the next provincial election.”How we’re going to do it is going to come down to good planning,” Sala said during a press conference last week. “We’ve done a lot of multi-year planning work that I think is paying dividends. Ultimately that will result in us ensuring that revenues match up with expenses.”Does it really matter if Manitoba doesn’t balance the books within two years? Not really. The province is in no imminent danger of a credit downgrade, even as net provincial debt has risen to $35.3 billion and the cost of servicing that debt last year was $2.3 billion, which works out to nine per cent of total provincial spending in 2024-25.What is important is for the finance minister and premier to level with Manitobans about the state of the provincial books. The only revenue increases coming to Manitoba will be modest increases. The only significant spending cuts coming would involve the NDP engaging in the form of slash-and-burn workforce management they decried when Brian Pallister’s PCs were in power.While voters may not pay as much attention to provincial finances as they used to, they did not become stupid overnight. Most Manitobans have bank accounts and many have credit cards.You do not need to be an economist to understand the books don’t balance themselves.ABOUT THE AUTHORBartley Kives joined CBC Manitoba in 2016. Prior to that, he spent three years at the Winnipeg Sun and then 18 at the Winnipeg Free Press, writing about politics, music, food and outdoor recreation. He’s the author of three books – two of them Canadian bestsellers – and the winner of a Canadian Screen Award for reporting.
Halfway through the NDP’s 1st term in power, the runway to a balanced budget has run out
