Is simply serving as premier enough to earn Order of Manitoba honour?

Former premier Brian Pallister will be among the prominent Manitobans who this year will be inducted into the Order of Manitoba. Not to be overly provocative, but does Pallister deserve the honour?

The order is intended to celebrate prominent citizens who “demonstrated excellence and achieved outstanding, sustained contributions to the social, cultural, or economic well-being of Manitoba and its residents.”

You can see many, if not most, of those qualities in the other 11 citizens who are being inducted along with Pallister: Former Canadian Football League star running back Andrew Harris; opera singer Tracy Dahl; singer, songwriter and producer Chantal Kreviazuk; and Olympic hockey medallist Jocelyne Larocque. Other inductees may not be as well known, but are prominent in their fields: Dr. Joss Reimer, now the chief public health officer of Canada; Indigenous leader Diane Roussin; elder Bille Schibler; Mondetta Clothing CEO Ash Modha; Applied Electromagnetics Laboratory founder Dr. Lotfollah Shafai; restaurateur and philanthropist Doug Stephen; and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Peter MacDonald.

It is pointless to spend too much time debating the integrity of the process that identifies inductees. There is an application form that must be supported by references. Applicants are then vetted by an advisory committee that makes recommendations to the current premier, who then makes them official.

Does the award genuinely recognize excellence and sustained contributions to Manitobans? It’s an interesting question that becomes much harder to answer when you get down to assessing the eligibility of politicians.

Pallister is an excellent case in point.

He was a successful Portage la Prairie insurance broker who also spent an impressive amount of his adult life as an elected public servant, both at the federal and provincial levels. He became premier in 2016.

Largely because of his surging unpopularity with Manitobans, he was forced from his job by his own caucus in 2021. When you look at the entirety of his time as premier — the accomplishment that really earned him an induction — his unceremonious departure was certainly not unwarranted.

Pallister supporters will argue he brought a measure of fiscal accountability to provincial government, managing expenditures and producing a surplus before the COVID-19 pandemic blew up the treasury. He also introduced significant tax cuts.

However, Pallister also crippled the health-care system with a botched re-organization of Winnipeg hospitals and funding cuts, refused to negotiate new contracts with public-sector workers and suffered controversy when Manitobans learned he was spending huge amounts of time at his Costa Rica vacation property.

The two previous paragraphs are, admittedly, not a comprehensive list of highlights and lowlights from Pallister’s five years at the helm. However, they are the seminal milestones, both positive and negative.

Does a record like that rise to the level of “excellence and… outstanding, sustained contributions to the social, cultural, or economic well-being of Manitoba and its residents?”

The answer to that question will undoubtedly be viewed through partisan lenses.

To be clear, scrutinizing Pallister’s induction is not just an argument about whether he personally lived up to the criteria of the Order of Manitoba. It’s really about whether it’s appropriate to appoint any partisan politician.

The Order of Manitoba was created in 1999 as part of a broadening of the province’s honours which include the Order of the Buffalo Hunt. Since its creation, premiers of Manitoba dating back decades have been inducted; Greg Selinger, Gary Doer, Gary Filmon, Howard Pawley, Sterling Lyon, Ed Schreyer and Duff Roblin are all members. So, too, are many federal and provincial politicians.

Premiers get in almost automatically within five years of leaving office, which suggests that being elected to highest public office is, in and of itself, a sufficient contribution to society to warrant this kind of accolade. And that by including all premiers, the non-partisan nature of the order is being protected.

While automatically enrolling every premier regardless of party, performance or policy may seem non-partisan, it ultimately undermines the legitimacy of the order itself.

It also leaves unanswered questions about what, if anything, a former premier can do to get excluded from the virtually automatic enrolment in the order?

The woman elected by the Tories to replace Pallister, former premier Heather Stefanson, offers an interesting case in point. Stefanson spent less time in office than Pallister but her performance during the 2023 election ensures that her tenure will live in infamy.

During a campaign where her party trailed the NDP badly, Stefanson oversaw advertising and messaging that celebrated her decision not to search a landfill for Indigenous women who were the victims of a serial killer. Everyone, including Obby Khan, now the leader of the Progressive Conservative party, denounced what Stefanson and her campaign advisers did. It will remain one of the darkest chapters in Manitoba electoral history.

How will the public respond when, inevitably, Stefanson’s name appears as an inductee in the Order of Manitoba?

Getting elected to a municipal council or federal or provincial legislature is a great and noble pursuit. Those who spend years in elected office are, by most definitions, public servants who deserved to be thanked generously for their service.

However, premiers in particular get lots of automatic honours simply for occupying the office, including an official portrait hung alongside portraits of previous premiers in the Legislative Building.

Perhaps it’s time to leave it at that. Otherwise, we might have to start asking some hard questions about which premiers really deserve to be in the order.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca