All leaders but Pallister take centre stage in final stretch of campaign

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This article was published 07/09/2019 (2194 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The New Democrat, Liberal and Green leaders took brief pauses from making their final pitches to voters at doorsteps across the province Saturday to mark the campaign homestretch with more promises they hope will change the outcome polls are predicting on Sept. 10.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Conservatives put up Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires, who is running for the PCs in Riel, to defend the party’s incumbency in Winnipeg constituencies.

A PC spokesperson said Brian Pallister travelled 600 kilometres across southern Manitoba Saturday to attend events, including a rally near Morden in the afternoon. 

With only three sleeps until voters head to the ballot box, Squires kicked off the weekend press conferences in St. Vital with a handful of promises from the party’s Made-in-Manitoba Climate and Green Plan.

A re-elected PC government would make Manitoba the “cleanest, greenest, and most climate resilient province in the country,” said Squires, who travelled to the event on her bicycle.

She told reporters the party’s green plan includes doubling the positions for youth on its environment clean-up teams, installing 120 new kilometres of active transportation paths and banning recyclable materials from landfills, as well as investing in organic waste programs.

The party promised to spend an additional $10 million over the next four years to hire a total of 2,200 positions — most of which are for summer students — to plant trees and undertake clean-up projects in the Seine River, St. Vital Parkway and Birds Hill Provincial Park. It also pledged to earmark $30 million for new trails, including 100 kilometres of bike paths. “Our PC team will help get Manitobans moving and out of their cars through these trails,” she said.

If re-elected, the party would implement checks at landfills to ensure non-recyclables are not accepted, Squires added. She did not provide a figure on her party’s promise to expand existing recycling programs.

Liberals promise to boost literacy, early-childhood education

At the same time, on the opposite side of the city Saturday, the Liberals pledged to improve literacy rates if elected to government, with the goal of ensuring every child can read by the end of Grade 2.

Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont told reporters his party would move child-care responsibilities away from the Department of Families and into the education department, making way for development of literacy programs in early childhood education, prior to kindergarten.

“We would also make sure we’re assessing and catching kids…to identify any disabilities that they have and that can include hearing difficulties, vision difficulties, as well as other kinds of learning disabilities. But we have to push towards that goal of 100 per cent (literacy),” Lamont said.

The Grits pitched a series of education-related election promises at the morning press conference outside Maples Collegiate, including a $500,000 curriculum review separate from the ongoing K-12 review.

The party also pledged to develop a 10-year education funding plan for the province with input from educators, school divisions, parents and students; hire more education assistants; and change the funding formula with school divisions so that the province covers 100 per cent of upgrade and renovation costs for schools, rather than the current 50 per cent.

Lamont estimated all of the Liberals’ education promises (minus the curriculum review) would cost around $3.2 million. The party’s fully costed platform is expected today.

“We take a fundamentally different view of how education is supposed to work in this province,” he said, emphasizing the Liberals would focus on investment, not cuts, and equity-based funding for schools.

Greens introduce ‘zero-waste’ vision, pledge to ban single-use plastic

On Saturday afternoon, in the heart of Wolseley, Green leader James Beddome rallied his team to back the party’s call to make Manitoba the first “zero waste” province.

The leader promised his party would work with municipalities to start and finish existing composting programs, ban single-use plastics and crack down on producer responsibility for waste diversion — all in an effort to lessen the loads in Manitoba landfills. The Greens also promised to increase tipping fees to incentivize recycling.

“Organizations that are failing to divert an adequate amount of their products, we will rewrite the business plans for them because the fact is, we need to move to the zero-waste world,” he told reporters at the party’s headquarters in Wolseley.

Setting up a compost facility in Winnipeg is critical, the party said, adding it would contribute one third of the estimated $120 million it would cost to build such a centre.

“We really have to take care of every single source of greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a monetary cost, but there’s also a future cost,” said David Nickarz, the party’s candidate for Wolseley. “We’re looking at actually reducing greenhouse gas house emissions to survive, literally.”

NDP rallies in northwest neighbourhoods

To wrap up the Saturday announcements, NDP leader Wab Kinew told reporters his party would join the B.C. government’s class action lawsuit against opioid manufacturers if he is elected Manitoba’s next premier.

Surrounded by a sea of orange T-shirts outside the Philippine Canadian Centre of Manitoba, Kinew said the NDP’s rally in northwest Winnipeg Saturday was about “rallying the troops” and “lifting the spirits of all our great volunteers.”

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He spoke to a crowd of more than 100 alongside NDP candidates such as Tyndall Park incumbent Ted Marcelino — running for re-election against the Liberals’ Burrows incumbent in a riding to watch.

“We’ve been campaigning really hard… and we’re running against a team that’s afraid to campaign. You know what they do with their leader each and every day?” Kinew told the crowd. “They give the driver fifty bucks, ‘drive this guy as far away from the perimeter as you possibly can.’”

— With files from Jessica Botelho-Urbanski

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie

Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter

Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she first reported for the Free Press in 2017. Read more about Maggie.

Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.

Every piece of reporting Maggie produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.