The Pawley era: What was, and what might have been

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/03/2011 (5674 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was 23 years ago this month that former NDP premier Howard Pawley unceremoniously left Manitoba politics, and 15 years since he first began work on his memoirs. That is a long time to wrestle with your place in history.

It is often noted that politics is cruel, and few politicians have struggled with that reality more than Pawley. First elected premier in 1981, Pawley was re-elected in 1986 with a razor- thin majority — 30 seats in the 57-seat legislature. With one MLA sitting as Speaker (Myrna Phillips) and another who retired (Larry Desjardins), the table was set in the spring of 1988 for the event that would, for the most part, cast Pawley’s place in political history.

Disgruntled backbench MLA Jim Walding, a man who made no secret of his ambition to sit in cabinet, finally allowed his bitterness to boil over. Enticed by the opposition Progressive Conservatives, Walding rose in his seat in the Manitoba legislature to vote against the Pawley government’s budget. The government fell, Pawley resigned and the NDP entered a decade-long residence in the political wilderness.

In an interview from his home in Windsor, Ont., Pawley is unflinchingly honest about the failure of his government. And as you might expect, he takes the lion’s share of the responsibility for steering his government into an iceberg. “I still look back on those events and wonder, could it have been different? Was there something I could have done differently?

“I just didn’t foresee Jim Walding suddenly rising in his place and voting against us. Perhaps I was naive. I knew he was unhappy and I could see that at some point he would probably leave the party, but I just didn’t see him voting against us. When I look back at it, I still think there were probably a lot of things I could have done to stop it.”

Pawley said he has often wondered about why he did not do something to win the support of Liberal leader Sharon Carstairs, the only Grit in the legislature. Or whether he should have appointed Myrna Phillips to cabinet, offered the Speaker’s chair to a Tory MLA and fought to keep Desjardins in the fold until the next election. Or whether he should have given in and appointed Walding to cabinet. “It is inevitable that there is going to be a lot of second guessing,” he said.

It may well be that no premier in recent memory has been subject to as much second guessing, or who has had to carry such a negative perception of his time in office. Pawley’s tenure as premier started with a historic triumph. His victory in 1981 over Tory premier Sterling Lyon marked the first time in Manitoba history that a government was defeated after only one term in office. And through the 1980s, Pawley led a government that (much like today) outperformed the national average in economic growth and employment.

In 1987, Manitoba Public Insurance announced it would seek to raise auto insurance rates by more than 20 per cent. In those days, the province did not have the protection of the Public Utilities Board to oversee MPI rate increases. The precipitous increase in rates was greeted with a level of outrage and hostility rarely seen in Manitoba.

In fact, Pawley, to this day, believes only the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a more violent expression of public outrage. It matters little to those in politics now about whether the rate increase was justified; the NDP was vilified for meddling with MPI.

After Walding brought down the government, Pawley was accused of mismanaging the treasury and leaving the province in a deficit position. In fact, it was a year after Pawley’s defeat that it was confirmed he actually ran a $58-million surplus. No matter. By that time he was cast as the “tax-and-spend” NDP premier.

Pawley is patently aware of how history has treated him. And he acknowledges that political history, like the history of military conflict, is mostly written by the victors. Pawley said he only wants to put on the record a more balanced version of the events that defined his time in office. “I hope that, as some time has passed, people can look back now and say that my government did some good, and that we led the province through some tough times.”

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca