The Manitoba government needs to make life more affordable.

Budget 2025 is the time to do it.

A family living in Winnipeg making $75,000 per year pays about $5,687 in provincial taxes. Manitobans pay more in taxes than anywhere else in Western Canada.

That family is paying about $1,800 more in provincial taxes every year than a similar family in Regina and about $3,000 more than in Calgary.

That means that Albertans have $3,000 more to spend every year on the essentials. That means more trips to the grocery store or more money to use for rent. In Manitoba, all that extra cash is instead snatched up by the government.

The government is moving in the wrong direction on tax relief. For the entirety of 2024, the government cut the 14 cents per litre provincial fuel tax. During the cut, a two-vehicle family saved about $587.

On Jan. 1, 2025, the government hiked the gas tax up from zero to 12.5 cents per litre. That’s only 1.5 cents per litre less than the old rate. A two-vehicle family is now paying $526 more in gas taxes this year compared to 2024.

Polls conducted by Leger before the gas tax hike was announced showed that 73 per cent of Manitobans wanted the government to extend the gas tax cut again. Even the premier wanted it to stick around.

“If it was up to me, the [gas tax] holiday would last forever,” said Premier Wab Kinew.

News flash for the premier, as the politician in charge of the provincial government, he can keep Manitobans saving at the pumps.

The government should reinstate the gas tax cut and make it permanent.

Manitoba should go further with a PST cut. The Manitoba government charges taxpayers a seven per cent PST on almost everything they buy. In Saskatchewan the PST is six per cent and Alberta doesn’t have a PST at all.

Cutting the PST from seven to six per cent would save the average Manitoba family about $304 per year. It would also make Manitoba more competitive, making the Manitoba PST equal to Saskatchewan’s.

Lower taxes make it easier for a young professional to decide to move to Winnipeg rather than Regina. And in the case of the gas tax cut, it also means that a business that uses a lot of fuel will be able to expand and hire more employees with the savings from the gas tax cut.

And those benefits are spread out across the entire economy because every Manitoban is saving money. This is a far better option for growing the economy than the current government strategy of handing out taxpayer money to specific corporations and picking winners and losers.

For example, the government recently handed out $23.4 million to a bus company to build a new facility. Instead of helping all Manitobans through tax relief, the government has decided to use the tax bills of 4,000 families to help one single corporation.

In total, the government spends about $523 million per year on corporate welfare. Instead of enriching only certain corporations, the government should cancel all handouts and instead use that money to provide tax relief to Manitobans.

A gas tax and PST cut also don’t require any extra bureaucracy to get taxpayers saving. All the government needs to do is stop charging the gas tax and lower the PST rate, there is no fuss about applying for tax credits or mailing out cheques.

These tax cuts also benefit Manitobans who are less well off. Since neither the PST nor gas tax are tied to income, these taxes take a bigger chunk out of the wallets of the poor rather than those who are better off.

The government will be putting final touches on Budget 2025 soon. It needs to include tax relief to make life more affordable and help grow the economy.