Pallister’s toughest nut

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/05/2015 (3793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite everything that’s happened to the NDP over the past six months, it is far from guaranteed that they won’t form the next government.

Yes, they have been hobbled by the leadership crisis. Yes, they still have the same unpopular leader. Yes, their recent budget is banking on possible good times ahead to pull them out of deficit. Hopefully. Maybe.

Yet, each day in Question Period and in the recent spate of "good news" announcements, Premier Greg Selinger and his MLAs appear to be finding their legs, pulling things together, day by day, stitch by stitch, at least on the surface.

On the other side of the House, Opposition Leader Brian Pallister and his MLAs have also improved their game. The PC critics are more knowledgeable about their departments, and are speaking more confidently about issues from children in hotels to wildlife enforcement to education.

Where Pallister falters is being more concise on what he would do should he become premier in the next year’s general election.

Specifically, what he would do to eliminate what he calls "wasteful SpeNDP spending."

We’ve asked, some us repeatedly, where and what he would cut. He’s often said he would cut what he sees as bloated government communications and most recently, he’s criticized the $670,000 in severance paid out to seven former government staff. Both don’t add up to much in a core budget of $12.8 billion.

Besides expressing his ideas and platform more clearly, Pallister faces another hurdle: Winnipeg.

In successive quarterly surveys by Probe Research, the Tory leader’s popularity in Winnipeg has not budged significantly upwards since he became the party’s leader July 30, 2012. There was only a momentary blip upwards following the NDP’s about-face increase to the provincial sales tax in April 2013, but that’s it.

Not even the New Democrats turning on themselves this past year helped the Tories see an increase in support in Winnipeg.

Certainly, the NDP have taken a swooping nosedive in popularity over the past three years, but it appears it’s been more to the benefit of the Liberals than PCs.

The next Probe quarterly of provincial party support is out in June. It will be interesting to see where the PCs and New Democrats sit with the NDP’s leadership fight seemingly behind them and the increase to the PST a fading memory.

We will also be on the tail end of the current sitting when the poll is released. At almost every moment so far, the premier on down has raised the scary monster of supposed PC austerity measures, that if Pallister becomes the next premier he’d take a chainsaw to cut every government service Manitobans hold dear. It’d be a massacre, they declare with pointed fingers and grim tones.

The NDP have pulled stuff like this before and it’s worked. They defined former Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen in the minds of voters only to cement their hold on power in the 2011 election.

They are doing it now to Pallister, and he’s letting them.

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Before the next Probe poll comes out, we’ve constructed our own short, online survey on party support.

It’s not scientific by any means, but it’s more aimed on providing friendly advice to Brian Pallister.

Here are the results so far, as of May 26.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2knJKIlZ4xfTWZwbTEtNDRyY2M/view?usp=sharing

 

Progressive Conservative Support in Winnipeg, or below:

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