A strange political choice

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/09/2023 (710 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As campaign issues go, it’s an unfortunate one.

After all, during elections, political parties usually highlight the things they plan to do, not the things they insist they are not going to do.

This past weekend, the governing Progressive Conservatives took out advertising in this newspaper outlining their platform — and the top issue they listed, out of everything happening in this province, was Premier Heather Stefanson’s commitment not to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women disposed of in a dumpster by an alleged serial killer.

Under the banner “STAND FIRM”, Stefanson is quoted as saying “For health and safety reasons, the answer on the landfill dig just has to be no.”

Leave aside for a moment that the $184-million price tag for the dig was that high precisely to address the myriad health and safety concerns that arise when you take apart a large section of a landfill, piece by contaminated piece. And leave aside the unstated fact that the concerns about the landfill search, in reality, have far less to do about health and safety than they do about the price.

Let’s look instead at the position taken by potential voters in the upcoming provincial election.

It may be that the provincial Progressive Conservatives felt that they were latching onto a contentious issue that could distract voters from things like the current state of Manitoba health care — that they felt they’d found a distracting wedge issue that could be used to make crucially needed gains.

But while numbers from the Probe Research/Free Press/CTV Winnipeg poll show a deep division on the issue, the numbers don’t seem likely to do anything but harden support in the camps where it already stands. The numbers say 47 per cent of Manitobans support undertaking the search: 45 per cent oppose searching the landfill, and eight per cent are unsure. Thirty per cent strongly oppose undertaking a search. Equally, 30 per cent strongly support having a search.

It’s also interesting how the numbers break down.

For example, the pollsters write, “There is a clear and deep partisan divide on this issue. Fewer than one in five supporters of Premier Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservative party support searching the landfill, compared to nearly three-quarters of provincial NDP supporters and one-half of Manitoba Liberal supporters.”

Support for searching the landfill is strongest among women between the ages of 18 and 34 — in that group, 69 per cent support a search. And, as a whole, 57 per cent of women support a search, compared to 36 per cent of men.

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What do the numbers mean? Perhaps that, if it was meant to serve as a wedge issue, it’s not likely to work as planned — because the support is already solidly on one side or the other. It’s unlikely to cleave support away from the NDP, where support for a search is strongest.

The other problem is the distasteful optics of using the issue of the search for the bodies of Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris as a main campaign plank: it is being legitimately interpreted by many people as being a callous and unfeeling political tactic. “Standing firm” against the wishes of grieving families?

It clearly divides, rather than uniting.

Often, the details of how campaign decisions are made are never known. Sometimes, it takes months or even years for things to leak out of the party backrooms and into the light of day.

But it would be tremendously interesting to know, out of all the issues that arise during a provincial election about the governance of a province, just why the Tories picked this one as their campaign standard.