5 months before Manitoba's election, attack ad campaigns are already underway

If you can't wait for this fall's provincial election, you're in luck: Manitoba's two most popular political parties are already taking aim at each other in attack ads.

In one pre-election ad, the governing Progressive Conservatives accuse the Opposition New Democratic Party of planning to raise the provincial sales tax by three percentage points.

In another ad, the NDP claims the PCs fired Manitoba nurses.

Both of these claims, you may be shocked to learn, can not be described as accurate.

The PCs can not cite a single source as the basis for their allegation, while the NDP are repeating a murky 2019 election-campaign claim debunked by CBC News four years ago.

The PCs' line of attack was first unveiled on April 15, when Premier Heather Stefanson told members of her party NDP Leader Wab Kinew will follow in his predecessor Greg Selinger's footsteps and raise the PST.

"Now I hear they're even looking at a 10-per-cent PST. Can you believe that? Could you imagine what will happen to our province if that, if that goes through?" Stefanson said during an address to Progressive Conservative party members.

When pressed by reporters about where precisely she heard about this three-percentage-point hike, Stefanson could not identify a source. The PCs nonetheless proceeded to use that claim in an attack ad that started running on the radio earlier this week.

"The NDP will hike the PST to 10 per cent if elected this time," the ad warns. "That's what happens when the NDP promise the moon but only have one pocket to reach into — and that's yours."

Pressed further about the source of the three-percentage-point PST hike, Stefanson's communications director suggested the jump is inevitable.

"Past behaviour is the best predictor of future action," Braeden Jones said Thursday in a statement.

"The premier has heard this fear of steep NDP PST tax hikes everywhere, in amounts even greater than 10 per cent, especially from Manitobans who remember the Selinger PST hike after he promised not to."

When pressed, Jones could not cite a source for the three-per-cent PST hike his party says the NDP has planned.

That task was left to Stefanson, who told reporters the claim is actually not based on anything she heard, as she previously stated, but rather as a byproduct of costing out NDP promises to date.