PREMIER Gary Doer does a pretty fair impression of former prime minister Jean Chrétien once in a while. His accent may be a little bit off, but perhaps the premier can mimic the little guy from Shawinigan so well because in so many ways, his style of campaigning and governing neatly mirrors the method the three-term Liberal prime minister used to such great effect.
In this provincial election, Doer has morphed into Chrétien circa 2000, campaigning solely on the basis that he enjoys being in charge and that he's a better choice than the other guy. Clearly, it's working, for if the polls and pundits are correct in their prognostications, Doer and Chrétien will share the rare achievement of winning three straight majority governments. That's a rare feat for any premier or prime minister in this country.
There are many parallels between the Chrétien and the federal Liberals' successful bid for a third majority in 2000, and Doer's push for an NDP three-peat in 2007. Both campaigns were based on the popularity of their respective leaders, and both were carefully crafted to ensure that voters' expectations stayed low enough to return these incumbents to power.
In 2000, after seven years in power, the sheen was starting to wear off the federal Liberal brand. There were already dull rumblings within the Liberal party that it was time for Chrétien to step aside, as it seemed that his government had lost its intellectual bearings, becoming instead simply a vehicle for exercising power.
In Manitoba circa 2007, the same could be said about Doer and his party, who have spent the past 30 days making puny promises that merely build upon what they've already delivered during seven years in power.
Like Doer, Chrétien also faced a new external threat in 2000 -- the rise of the Canadian Alliance and its telegenic new leader, Stockwell Day. Our political attention spans are short, but it wasn't very long ago when the so-called experts believed that Day, who knocked off the stodgy Preston Manning to lead the new party, had what it took to knock off the Liberals and their popular leader.
Hindsight being 20-20, we all know how this story ended. Day and the CA complained a lot about how taxes in this country were too high, so Chrétien and his equally popular finance minister, Paul Martin, delivered a mini-budget in the fall of 2000 that delivered a broad range of personal and corporate tax cuts.
Sound familiar? It's exactly what Doer and his party did this spring to their new rival, Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen, in their annual budget.
In one fell swoop, the NDP picked off the complaints of the opposition, the business community and others who love their taxes low and their governments small by tinkering with the tax code.
Then, just as Chrétien did during the campaign against Day when the CA leader tried to flatten out the tax regime, Doer has assailed his new rival's list of deeper tax cuts, calling them "reckless" and questioning where the money to pay for them will come from.
The final comparison between these two savvy politicians is how they both tried to use fear to win a third term. For Chrétien, his bogeyman came in two forms: Day's on-his-sleeve Christian evangelism, and his desire to shrink government down to nothing. By painting him as some sort of religious zealot, Chrétien harnessed the fear many Canadians had that Day was prepared to rip down the wall between his church and a state that would barely exist as Canadians knew it.
Doer, on the other hand, relied on a different kind of bogeyman. To rally his own troops and sow fear among undecided voters, Doer painted McFadyen as the progeny of former PC premier Gary Filmon and accused him of wanting to sell Manitoba Hydro.
As crass and cynical as this move was, it worked brilliantly -- McFadyen and his Tories spent a good portion of the campaign defending themselves against this accusation, going so far as to waste an entire day talking about a hokey piece of legislation, the Legacy Act, that would keep Manitoba Hydro in public hands unless all 57 MLAs in the legislature agreed to sell it.
It was as defensive as Day's hand-scrawled assertion during a 2000 televised leader's debate that there would be "no two-tier health-care." In both cases, the two leaders spent precious time debating the issues on their rivals' terms, and not on their own.
All of this, of course, worked for Chrétien: He won a larger majority in the November 2000 election than he did three years prior to that.
And we'll know Tuesday if Doer's latest attempt to mimic the little guy from Shawinigan works out.
Curtis Brown is the editorial page editor of the Brandon Sun. His column appears biweekly on Saturday.
cbrown@brandonsun.com
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