A triumph of old arguments and small ideas

Opinion

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This article was published 27/03/2016 (3487 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pity the undecided voter.

Not quite two weeks into the provincial election campaign and it’s hard to find a compelling narrative that would help undecided Manitobans — estimated in pre-election polls to be as high as 25 per cent of the electorate — make up their minds in time for April 19.

Most polls still have the Progressive Conservatives in front with a commanding lead of 20 or more points. The NDP and Liberals remain more or less statistically tied for last place in the mid to low 20s. The results are tighter in Winnipeg, where the Tories are a little less popular and the Liberals and NDP a little more so.

Why so much ambivalence? None of the parties in this campaign has done much to create a compelling reason for voters to support them.

The best thing that the front-running Tories have going for them is the fact they are not the NDP. Playing off a palpable desire among voters for change — hardly surprising after nearly 17 years of NDP government — Tory Leader Brian Pallister has taken an extremely safe path in the early days of the campaign. However, his primary focus on providing voters with reasons not to vote NDP, rather than a convincing argument for supporting the Tories, has sucked some of the life out of this campaign.

Pallister has offered voters mostly modest campaign ideas with few hard details. Many of his planks are just vague promises to do better than the NDP, or study a problem and come up with solutions later. Not exactly stuff that is going to generate a Tory blue tidal wave of support.

Despite promising to run the busiest campaign “in Manitoba history,” Pallister has been invisible outside one or two scheduled events per day. If he is out pressing the flesh, door-knocking in his own riding or helping out other Tory candidates, it’s all being done outside the glare of media attention.

This strategy — a classic front-runner approach — typically provides opportunities for other parties to make gains. Limited media availability and selective participation in debates — a strategy designed to limit the chances of a gaffe — leaves a lot of dead air to be filled by other politicians. However, there is no evidence to suggest the Liberals or NDP are making good use of this opportunity.

The incumbent NDP has been beating the drum heavily on a single narrative point: a vote for the PCs is a vote for less health care, weaker public education and a general evisceration of core government services. It is the latest edition of a perennial NDP campaign tactic that, despite having been revealed as a triumph of rhetoric over fact, has proven to be incredibly successful in dampening support for the Tories.

The NDP argues that all Tory leaders are echoes of former Tory premier Gary Filmon, who famously cut funding to health and education in the mid-1990s. Lost in this narrative are two important points: first, that Filmon was only responding to a precipitous cut in federal transfer payments initiated by the then-Liberal government in Ottawa; and that austerity was the fashionable policy of the day as Ottawa and the provinces made balanced budgets the top fiscal priority.

No matter, the NDP ratchets up the rhetoric and fear by extrapolating that along with a general gutting of core services, the Tories would sell off Manitoba Hydro and privatize parts of the health care system. Although Pallister has occasionally said things that feed this narrative — early pledges to cut spending “across the board” and the aforementioned cut in PST without any idea of how to replace that revenue — there isn’t anything in the current Tory platform to support those allegations. That has not, however, stopped the NDP from sounding the same alarm over and over again.

And then we have the Liberals. Having surged in pre-writ polls, the Liberals and rookie Leader Rana Bokhari have been struggling to find their place in Manitoba’s political universe. The Grit platform to date has been a loose, uninspiring collection of the small, blatantly populist ideas that earned them valuable pre-election attention, but which are unlikely to draw meaningful support from voters looking for an alternative to both the NDP and Tories.

The Liberals’ biggest concern going into this campaign was whether their leader could perform well enough to make her party a legitimate alternative. Although it’s still early, there is clearly some validity to those concerns.

The Liberal campaign has been, to date, unspectacular. The announcements she has showcased so far cover the bases of major policies areas — health care, education, environment — but Bokhari continues to struggle when asked to flesh out her ideas. Like the Tories, there are too many commitments to study and consult, and far too few concrete ideas.

This has been a campaign that, so far, has lacked any sense of urgency or packed anything close to a visceral impact. The Tories are trying to get through the campaign by doing and saying as little as they can, while the NDP and Liberals struggle to find an identity that resonates with voters.

All in all, this campaign has been a triumph of old arguments and small ideas.

And that’s not the kind of stuff that convinces voters to leave the safety of the ranks of the undecided.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986.  Read more about Dan.

Dan’s columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press’ editing team reviews Dan’s columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.