Moribund Manitoba

So Gary Doer has gone but he still lives on. He dominated the province for 10 years and his party, too, so it is unlikely that his legacy would have changed overnight.

Doer took advantage of good financial times and the disintegration of provincial politics to provide steady, unimaginative government that pleased the middle ground of public opinion. Most of all he wrapped -- or is it swaddled? -- his politics in an endless cocoon of impression-management and talking-points-rhetoric that somehow suffocated alternatives. Doer squeezed the lifeblood out of the reform imagination of the province.

Greg Selinger, the new premier, and his finance minister, Rosann Wowchuk, may not be very different if the evidence of the recent budget is anything to go by.

The budget speech she recently gave is encased within the same mind-numbing rhetoric that has become the stock-in-trade of the present NDP. So she tells us mellifluously that "across the province we have strong vibrant communities where people come together to work towards a brighter future." Mostly, of course, we dismiss this sort of stuff as childish verbal filler.

But it does conjure up the sort of fantastical mythology that was popular in Stalinist Russia of giddy kulaks dancing together on their co-op farms and dreaming of a future of hydro dams up north and pork for dinner. Of course, Selinger and Wowchuk are not Stalinists. But in order to avoid the suspicion of walking in the footsteps of Uncle Joe they might at least not have chosen to label their road map out of deficits as a "Five Year Plan."

That said, it is a modestly daring budget because it does add a lot of debt, not just this year at over a half a billion dollars but it projects three more years of similarly sized deficits, until a balanced budget magically emerges in 2014-15. The size of the province's debt is a constant matter of debate. The NDP chooses to say it is small because they are only talking about debt and deficits on the government's operating budget but the balance of its total debt is with Manitoba Hydro and the government's pension liabilities to its own civil servants and teachers.

Nevertheless, in the Keynesian mood that the recent recession has engendered this budget will not be unpopular with the public, especially since the stimulus of deficit spending is to be expended on education and health.

But 10 years of plenty will now be followed by five years of famine. The NDP must be ruing the failures of its policy choices since 1999. Health expenses are galloping ahead, markedly faster than economic growth and so the failure of the government's wellness strategy is evident for all to see.

And how much more money the government could have made available to universities if it had not pursued the foolishness of the tuition freeze for all those years.

In the time of plenty, was it not the prudent thing to do to think about how its revenues could be self-controlling given the dependence Manitoba has on federal transfers? How can the province take seriously its financial independence when it depends on another government for a full third of its revenues?

The realities are that the province is now in the world of a hope-and-a-prayer. The government must be beseeching whatever gods it believes in to deliver a future provincial economy that will bounce back quickly and resoundingly because only if that is the case will the projected balance materialize in 2014-15.

Nor is it clear that Hugh McFadyen and the Conservatives have much to offer. Much like Doer was, McFadyen is full of bombast. Yes, in the budget debate he railed against deficits and how accumulated debts undermine our ability to finance future expenditures on health and education. This is true and certainly he is right in thinking that the NDP failed to provide for a time of famine.

But politics is about dealing with things as they are and responding to things as McFadyen will inherit them if he does defeat the NDP. He has forgotten that other part of the Keynesian mantra, that in the long run we are all dead.

In the short run what is he to do about maintaining existing levels of expenditure on social and educational programs? Or, is he in effect proposing cutbacks already? His only substantial proposal is that a government led by him would save $640 million by cancelling the building of a transmission line down the west side of Lake Manitoba. But this saving would only be to Manitoba Hydro not to the government.

There is an election already planned for September 2011 and, with Doer's going, McFadyen must see the brass ring within his grasp. But he has a lot of work to do. His caucus is lacklustre and overly preoccupied by crime and punishment. He lacks credible voices from the city and the professional middle classes.

The Liberals must also relish the next election, but their leader, Jon Gerrard, has held his present position for over 10 years and has yet to gain traction on any major provincial issue. He is proof that a decent, intelligent man does not necessarily succeed in politics.

Anyway, we don't hear much from the Liberals, nor the Tories for that matter. And that IS the problem in a nutshell.

Provincial politics in Manitoba is moribund. The compensation for MLAs is close to subsistence wages. Why would anyone run for provincial politics if it results in a drop in her standard of living? The penny-wise-pound-foolish mentality of the electorate produces a legislature, in most respects, of average, underwhelming citizens.

And even when MLAs do have something to say it is impossible to hear them because the media, with the exception perhaps of this paper, have given up on seriously covering provincial politics.

This feeds nicely into the present government's agenda of making politics something almost completely to do with administration and bureaucracy. The legislature meets minimally, enough to allow the fig-leaf impression of possibly living in a parliamentary democracy and as a consequence the government, and especially the premier, with their talking-point communications flaks have the complete upper hand.

Solutions to the financial predicament of the province are impossible to discover because they are never publicly discussed and, anyway, alternatives are drowned out by the government's propaganda machine.

What we have in Manitoba is government by bureaucracy, ostensibly in our interests but without the real checks and balances of a functioning responsible government. We live under a version of what Charles Taylor, the eminent Canadian philosopher, calls a soft despotism.

Allen Mills is a professor of politics at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 6, 2010 A10