The odd world of Greg Selinger

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/01/2015 (4199 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All things considered, it’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Premier Greg Selinger.

Selinger is a full-time premier who is being forced to fight part-time for his job against two full-time challengers.

Being a premier is a hard enough job, considering all the uncertainty that seems to have become the norm in this country. Selinger is facing down yet another year of deficit financing for his government’s programs, an increasingly low approval rating among the electorate and another spring that seems sure to bring a new array of watery natural disasters.

Add to that the stress of a very public, very messy revolt in his caucus and the humiliation of having to fight former colleagues for your job, and you have a scenario few politicians could endure, let alone survive.

Of course, this is in many ways a dilemma of Selinger’s own making. It was the premier who decided a full-blown leadership contest was the only way to settle the revolt. He could have advocated for a leadership-review vote, allowing him to use his record to obtain a renewed mandate from his party. He could have, but did not.

It was also Selinger’s decision to remain premier and fight the leadership battle at the same time. Although there were no rules forcing him to step down, many critics suggested trying to do both would become impractical. There are signs already those concerns were well-founded.

Selinger is resolute his days are devoted solely to running the province, and only evening and weekend hours will he allow himself to campaign for the leadership vote in March. It’s a preposterous situation, all in all.

Selinger and his remaining loyal staff continue to maintain the firewall between government and leadership business is intact and both responsibilities will be well-served. Observers in the business community have already suggested, however, the government is in an uneasy holding pattern, stalled out until the leadership issue is settled.

The reality is any decisions being made now could be meaningless if Selinger loses and someone else takes the reins in March. It also means the people Selinger has put in key portfolios are aware any initiatives or policies they direct could be swept away by a change in leadership.

All that supposes Selinger loses, and it’s not at all clear that will happen. In fact, Selinger’s two rivals have yet to show indisputable signs they are ready to take over.

Theresa Oswald has been out and about the province looking much like a party leader in a general-election campaign. She has been making policy announcements, focusing heavily on health care (one of her former portfolios). She has also offered intriguing tidbits that will appeal to the NDP base, such as a PST rebate to soften the blow of the one-point hike in 2013, and increased rent allowances for those on social assistance.

Most importantly, however, Oswald has said as premier, she would not keep to any deadline for eliminating the budget deficit. Oswald said she will not cut spending on core government programs to meet the 2016 deadline for deficit elimination. This could be a watershed issue for the NDP.

Despite making only minimal progress, Selinger has refused to abandon deficit-reduction deadlines. Each time Selinger replaces one deadline with another, he creates a larger political problem. Admitting deadlines will not, in fact, produce a measured, sensible solution to the deficit is a significant step forward in the policy discussion.

It’s also a position poll results tell us could be tenable; most voters believe protecting core services and infrastructure outweigh deficit reduction as government priorities.

Ashton, meanwhile, has not yet revealed a master strategy of any kind. His pledges range from the curious (a minister to promote a “buy local” strategy), to the bland (a “renewal conference” for the NDP), and to the downright mischievous (promising to hold a referendum on eliminating, amending or keeping the PST hike for infrastructure).

It’s not hard to listen to Oswald and Ashton and imagine both are suffering from a bit of frustration, the result of having trouble getting traction for their own ideas when they were still part of Selinger’s cabinet. And it’s true the dissident ministers who resigned believed the current premier was mostly interested in his own ideas and less enamoured with the ideas generated by his cabinet.

And what does Selinger think of the pledges being made by his rivals? Is he struggling to find responses to their ideas, or worried a sudden flurry of policy changes suggest the government he runs is somewhat moribund and void of its own ideas?

Unfortunately, we don’t know, because the journalists tasked with asking the premier those and other tough questions about the leadership campaign have had trouble getting Selinger to respond to the other candidates’ pledges.

Our big mistake? We keep asking him during “premierial” hours, and not during “leadership campaign” hours.

Which only serves to confirm one indisputable truth: Manitoba’s oddest political story ever seems destined to become odder as we get closer to March.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca