Tories seek to stay afloat on deluge of good news By: Dan Lett Posted: 3:01 PM CDT Monday, Jun. 5, 2023

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/06/2023 (825 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not hard to imagine when Premier Heather Stefanson finally gets a chance to lay her head down each night and get some well-earned sleep, she dreams about microphones, lecterns and prepared notes.

The leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government has been working overtime lately, pumping out good-news announcements at what might be a record pace.

Last week alone, she issued a statement apologizing to the former residents of the Manitoba Developmental Centre, a notorious Portage la Prairie-based institution for those with intellectual disabilities. She also committed $700,000 to a further design study for a proposed widening of Kenaston Boulevard in Winnipeg.

Earlier in May, it was $30-million expansion of the Grace Hospital ICU, a new ambulance funding agreement with the City of Winnipeg, the twinning of the Trans-Canada highway, subsidies for WestJet to maintain a new Winnipeg to Atlanta service, increased funding for Winnipeg Pride, and the creation of a new gender equity secretariat.

This week, the hits kept on coming: a new affordable housing initiative in Winnipeg, and $145 million for northern health services.

That’s just the premier; the rest of Stefanson’s cabinet have been out in force, shaking hands and trumpeting Tory generosity with a heightened level of gusto.

In all, the Tories issued 86 news releases in May, nearly three per day.

Why the rush, you may ask? There is little doubt the upcoming provincial election, scheduled for no later than Oct. 3, is prompting the Tories to unleash all their best good-news announcements before a 60-day writ-period blackout begins (somewhere around Aug. 5).

After the blackout begins, there are restrictions on the types of taxpayer-funded communication a government may perform. So, better to get it all out before it becomes legally precarious to do so.

Has the pace of announcements picked up? To be honest, it’s hard to tell because of external factors that drive up the total number of news releases.

For example, the 86 announcements in May were noticeably more than May 2022, which logged 70. But in 2020 and 2021, the province was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, which added significantly to the total number of government announcements.

In June 2022, there were 76 news releases issued. A year earlier, there were 100, driven by 45 COVID-19 bulletins and vaccine program announcements.

We won’t really know if the government is trying to exploit the pre-blackout period to drive announcements until we get through June and July, and look at the numbers.

Opposition parties have long complained governments have an unfair advantage going into an election, given they have a limitless pot of money for communications from which to draw. While the opposition is not wrong about the unfairness, there are two caveats.

First, a government must run on its record and there’s only so much that should be done to stop a government from telling people what it’s doing.

Second, every governing party of every political stripe takes advantage of taxpayer funds to tilt the playing field in its favour.

All that said, the Progressive Conservatives have been quite a bit more shameless about maintaining and even enhancing this advantage.

In early August 2019, right before the Sept. 10 election, then-premier Brian Pallister participated in a ribbon-cutting for the Waverley Street rail line underpass, well within the then-90-day blackout period. When asked, Pallister said he wasn’t announcing anything, he was only “praising” the City of Winnipeg and federal government, funding partners in the underpass.

When opposition parties cried foul, Pallister smirked in a way that suggested what he was really doing is offering his competitors a single-finger salute.

Perhaps because of the backlash, however, in 2021, Pallister shortened the blackout to 60 days from 90, and increased the number of things a government could announce.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Pallister wouldn’t be around long enough to take advantage of the diminished blackout; a few months after passing the new measures, he was forced out of office by his own party.

The blackout was, and remains, a bit of a joke that has no real penalties and thus offers no real deterrent.

The blackout law definitely needed fixing, but no one was recommending the changes Pallister introduced. The biggest pre-existing concern was the degree to which the governing party could decide rather arbitrarily what it could and could not announce.

The PC government under Pallister would (as most governments have done) slip in a few funding announcements during the blackout period, and then invoke the blackout to prevent things such as updated figures for nursing job vacancies from being released by health authorities.

In short, the blackout was, and remains, a bit of a joke that has no real penalties and thus offers no real deterrent.

If a new governing party is elected this fall — and I’m not saying that’s going to happen — it would be great if it fixed the blackout provision once and for all, creating a definitive list of dos and don’ts, and some hefty financial penalties for breaches.

Unless that other governing party decides to use the blackout to its advantage.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com