Meeting the new boss — same as the old boss — sealed Tories’ fate

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This article was published 15/06/2023 (870 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s no surprise Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative party has made virtually no gains in public opinion polls over the past few months. Nor is it any wonder that Premier Heather Stefanson still ranks dead-last among Canadian premiers in approval ratings.

There’s no mystery behind it. The party continues to alienate voters, particularly in Winnipeg where the Tories would need a superhuman turnaround over the next 16 weeks to avoid defeat in the upcoming provincial election, slated for Oct. 3.

The problem for the Tories is they have, for the most part, refused to repudiate the tattered legacy of former premier Brian Pallister. With the exception of cancelling his widely opposed plan to eliminate most school boards across the province, the government has wholeheartedly embraced the majority of what Manitobans disliked most about him.

The party changed leaders but kept most of the former premier’s playbook.

An Angus Reid Institute poll released this week shows the Tories are 25 percentage points behind the NDP in Winnipeg, a gap the party has been unable to overcome for well over two years. Nine consecutive quarterly surveys by Probe Research Inc. dating back to March 2021 show the Tories between 22 and 33 points behind in Winnipeg. If those numbers hold, the Tories would be nearly wiped out in Winnipeg. They would lose government.

The time-for-a-change dynamic started with Pallister but it took a foothold under Stefanson. That should come as no surprise since Stefanson adopted most of her predecessor’s agenda.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in health care, the No. 1 issue for voters in just about every survey conducted over the past two years in Manitoba.

The Tories’ decision to consolidate hospital operations in Winnipeg between 2017 and 2019, including shuttering three emergency departments and closing more than 100 hospital beds, triggered a series of bad outcomes in health care, from severe staff shortages and poor workplace morale to growing wait times and ER bottlenecks.

The failed reforms were made worse by Pallister’s decision to create a new layer of bureaucracy — Shared Health, a government agency that added unnecessary costs and administrative confusion to the system, while doing nothing to improve patient care.

Not only has Stefanson embraced those policies (and participated in their creation), she added another layer of bureaucracy: the diagnostic and surgical recovery task force, a largely political body that has produced little, if anything, in the way of tangible improvements and added greater confusion and expense to the system.

One of Pallister’s costliest policies was the province’s refusal to bargain in good faith with front-line health-care workers, leaving thousands of staff without contracts for multiple years (four for nurses, before approving a contract in 2021, five, and counting, for allied health workers). Stefanson has continued that legacy, contributing to widespread workplace strife and an exodus of staff.

The premier has embraced almost every aspect of Pallister’s health reforms. She even kept the last health minister he appointed, Audrey Gordon, widely regarded as the most incompetent minister in government.

Pallister’s decision to usher in deep tax cuts, at a time when government is still running deficits and underfunding most front-line services, has also been enthusiastically supported by Stefanson. Tax cuts have not been identified as a priority by Manitobans in any recent public surveys. They didn’t even register in the top 10 most important provincial issues in the latest Angus Reid poll.

Despite that, the Stefanson government continues to aggressively cut income taxes, sales taxes and education property taxes, robbing the provincial treasury of billions of dollars a year in revenue that could be used for public schools, hospitals, mental health, addictions treatment and infrastructure, all of which have been listed as priorities for Manitobans in successive polling.

Pallister’s decision to interfere in setting Manitoba Hydro rates, his opposition to supervised drug consumption sites and his mismanagement of Manitoba Public Insurance have all continued under Stefanson. Even Pallister’s decision to freeze funding for municipalities was adopted by the premier until a few months ago.

Is it any wonder Stefanson has been unable to move the needle in public opinion polls, or improve her personal approval rating, ranked last by Angus Reid in every quarterly survey since she became premier?

There have been some 11th-hour policy changes by the Tories in the months leading up to October election, such as loosening the purse strings for health care and education funding. However, last-minute bouts of benevolence prior to elections rarely sway voters, especially when voter intention is as deeply entrenched as it has been for the past two years.

Stefanson sealed her fate in the first few months after taking over from her predecessor when she refused to take Manitoba down a decidedly different road. That’s unlikely to change between now and Oct. 3.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca