What we’ve got here is failure to communicate, Mr. Premier

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2017 (3041 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THIS week, Premier Brian Pallister has been a man on the run. Twice this week, Pallister skipped scrums with reporters after question period. For most journalists covering the Manitoba legislature, this is quality time with the leader of the government. In fact, it is often the only time journalists get to see the whites of the premier’s eyes. Skipping those scrums is noteworthy.

Typically, if there is a pressing personal or professional reason for skipping scrums, that will be made clear to the journalists who document the premier’s daily activities. No explanation has been provided.

Why all the ducking and running? It’s not entirely clear why Pallister has been so evasive, although this has been an oddly uncomfortable week for him.

There are the committee hearings into Bill 28, a law that would impose wage freezes on public servants without the formality of negotiations. As well, many communities in Winnipeg are still up in arms about plans to close three of the city’s six hospital emergency rooms. And the Manitoba Labour Board is hearing a complaint from the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, which has accused Pallister of illegally meddling in contract talks.

The icing on the cake? This week, the opposition New Democrats managed to find a way of reviving debate about the premier’s luxury vacation home in Costa Rica.

Using a freedom of information request, the NDP acquired mobile phone records that suggest he had almost no contact with his staff while in Costa Rica. The NDP’s conclusion was Pallister lied when he said his trips south were “working vacations.”

This is really just opposition politics at its mischievous best. The NDP hasn’t found any evidence Pallister does not work when on holiday. In fact, the Free Press conducted a landline phone interview with Pallister when he was in Costa Rica in late January about the “night hunting” controversy. No matter, it’s time to beat the drum.

Pallister’s inability to manage the NDP attack, however, reveals a government that is still struggling to find a workable communications strategy.

Why all the difficulty with communications? Fiscal prudence may provide some answers.

To explain, consider the province’s controversial plan to reduce the number of hospital emergency rooms and urgent-care centres. The theory is it is better to have three well-staffed, well-resourced emergency rooms rather than six that do not have the equipment or the medical specialists to do everything an ER needs to do.

It’s a strategy that mirrors what other, larger cities have done. However, for it to be successful, the province must convince all those people who go to emergency rooms — but do not need emergency medicine — to go somewhere else.

To accomplish that goal, the province and Winnipeg Regional Health Authority promised a robust public-awareness campaign to explain the changes and educate people so they could look for medical attention in the most appropriate setting. There is no evidence of such a campaign more than a month after the announcement.

There is a website — the lamentably named healingourhealthsystem.ca — that looks as if it was put together by high school digital-arts students. Little information is available on the site, although there is a pretty slick, two-minute-long video describing the changes and the strategy behind them. Missing are other materials — radio and television ads, pamphlets mailed out to households, billboards — that would normally be behind a public-awareness campaign that is at the heart of one of the boldest health-care reorganizations in a generation.

A spokeswoman for the WRHA said a campaign will be rolled out over the next 24 months in phases, timed as actual changes are being made. What cannot be explained, however, is why the government is not already communicating with the public to explain that more than three-quarters of people who go to ERs don’t need to be there. The issue lives right now, but the government seems satisfied to sit on the sidelines.

This isn’t an isolated example. The Tories haven’t done much to defend their recent budget, which included the smallest funding increases for health and education seen in two decades. While Pallister ducks scrums, critics inside and outside the legislature are driving the debate, organizing protests, sending out newsletters and otherwise accusing the premier of taking us all to hell in a handbasket.

The inability to effectively present a case to the public appears to be the byproduct of a core belief held by the premier — namely, that money spent on government communications is a waste.

While in opposition, Pallister frequently lambasted the NDP for hiring too many communications and political staff and buying too many ads to promote its budgets or policy initiatives. Once in power, he celebrated his ability to operate a government with fewer ministries, a move that allowed him to hire fewer staff and lay off communicators. This, he said, would lower costs and provide better value for taxpayers.

Pallister does not understand communications is not an exercise in vanity or a needless add-on that steals money from core government services. Telling your citizens about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it is an essential element in a functional democracy.

The premier may find virtue in starving his own government of communications staff and resources. But in the end, the savings will be dwarfed by the damage done to his government’s overall message. And that is a fate he won’t be able to duck.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca