Manitoba government nominated for government waste award
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation nominated the Manitoba government for a Teddy Waste Award after wasting $90,547.91 of taxpayers’ money on a misleading gas tax ad campaign.
“It’s a clear waste of money to advertise a gas tax hike as a gas tax cut,” said Gage Haubrich, CTF Prairie Director. “The government could have saved itself and taxpayers some money by keeping the gas tax cut instead of wasting it on this ad campaign.”
The Manitoba government cut its 14 cents per litre gas tax to zero for the entirety of 2024. The government hiked the tax up by 12.5 cents per litre on Jan. 1, 2025.
In the lead up to the gas tax hike, the government ran a taxpayer-funded ad campaign with billboards featuring slogans such as “Permanent gas tax cut starting January 1st.”
A Manitoba family filling up a minivan and a pickup truck once every two weeks paid about $550 more in gas taxes in 2025 than they did in 2024.
The Teddy Waste Award is the golden pig-shaped trophy the CTF annually awards to governments’ worst waste offenders. The award is named after Ted Weatherill, a former federal appointee who was fired in 1999 for submitting a stack of dubious expense claims, including a $700 lunch for two in France.
This year’s winners include:
- Municipal Teddy Waste Award Winner: Toronto
Heritage Toronto wasted nearly $2,000 on a plaque to memorialize a raccoon that died in 2015.
- Provincial Teddy Waste Award Winner: B.C. Premier David Eby
The B.C. government spent $354,000 on three “wood-leather soccer balls” for display purposes, according to records obtained by the CTF.
- Federal Teddy Waste Award Winner: The Canada Revenue Agency
The auditor general found that the CRA’s “responses to general individual-tax questions were accurate only 17 per cent of the time.” The CRA’s responses on business taxes were accurate just 54 per cent of the time. Even then, the auditor general said the “completeness of response” was 31 per cent.
- Lifetime Achievement Teddy Award Winner: The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
The CTF caught the SSHRC spending $105,000 studying “the birth, life and death” of a grocery cart, $17,500 on a study about “casual sex among young adults living in Jasper” and $17,500 on a study about disgraced former rodeo princesses.
You can find the backgrounder on this year’s Teddy Waste Award nominees and winners HERE.
Photo of taxpayer-funded billboard:
