A bold pronouncement from the Ashton team

They say they have the numbers to win on the first ballot:

Meanwhile, Steve Ashton's campaign officials announced today that they have signed up or renewed 1,100 party memberships over the past several days and suggested the Thompson MLA is in the lead in attracting delegate support.

Further, they said Ashton could narrowly win the leadership on the first ballot.

Before the leadership race began, the provincial NDP had about 5,500 members, according to party officials. As of Sunday, the party had about 7,500 members.

Ashton campaign chairman Transcona Coun. Russ Wyatt, who turned over 250 new memberships at NDP headquarters on Portage Avenue this afternoon, said Ashton is selling memberships across the province, with most in the city of Winnipeg.

From the Winnipeg Free Press. Recruiting those new members is no small achievement; those 1100 memberships are worth 110 delegates at the convention under the formula used by the party. Of course, that's 110 out of 750, so it's far from a foregone conclusion. Actually it's more than 750, due to the fact that riding associations and labour are granted a certain number of automatic delegates (who some are calling "superdelegates", following the American example). And in any case, the other candidates have until Thursday to catch up, after which new members are not eligible to be delegates (or to elect them).

I have no idea if Ashton can win on the first ballot. I do suspect that if he can't do it on the first ballot, he won't do it at all; supporters of Selinger and Swan probably have more in common with each other than with supporters of Ashton, and will vote accordingly if their chosen candidate is dropped. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so.

Meanwhile, from the same article, Swan has taken a clear stance against the HST for the balance of this government's term, though he doesn't explicitly reject the idea of bringing it in afterwards if reelected. Not really that different, in that Selinger, as we've seen, has said that it doesn't seem like a good idea at this time, but isn't prepared to say never either.

And last, but not least, Selinger has picked up another endorsement, this one from Water Stewardship Minister Christine Melnick (same article yet again). Credit is due to Never Eat Yellow Snow for predicting this last week. I notice as well that while his domain name still directs to the caucus bio, Selinger now has a YouTube channel.

Selinger suspicious of HST

A month ago, Dan Lett was speculating that Manitoba would eventually acquiesce to the harmonized sales tax. At the time, finance minister Selinger was "taking a good, long look at the proposal". Well, it seems he remains unconvinced:

Harmonizing Manitoba's provincial sales tax with the federal GST could end up costing the government over $400-million a year, provincial Finance Minister Greg Selinger said Monday.

Mr. Selinger is still considering federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's ongoing request to meld the two sales taxes - but suggested Mr. Flaherty is going to have to put more on the table than he has because the impact in Manitoba could be very costly.

"It's a different situation in every province," said Mr. Selinger.

Mr. Selinger pointed to a 2008 C.D. Howe Institute analysis which suggests Manitoba revenues would plunge over $200-million a year under an HST.

But that figure, he noted, doesn't account for offsets offered to consumers to help reduce the extra tax they'd pay under an HST.

More recently, according to Endless Spin Cycle, the Brandon Sun (which is behind a subscription wall, so no direct link) reports that Selinger is still not keen on the idea, saying "At this stage I don’t think it would be wise to implement it right now ... I keep an open mind on it, but the business case for it today was not good."

For what it's worth, I'm not keen on the HST either; the feds may be trying to bribe us with a large amount of money (an estimated $500 million according to the National Post article quoted above), but consider this: the current PST is on goods (most of which, like it or not, are imported and thus don't create jobs here), while the HST would result in adding more tax to services (which do create jobs here). So kudos to Greg for refusing to cave in to the pressure. Nor can he be accused of knee-jerk rejection of the idea; all he's saying is that after careful consideration, it doesn't seem that we should be doing it now. To my mind that's a good approach to an issue like this.