Pre-season practice over; it’s governing time for Kinew, NDP

Opinion

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This article was published 06/03/2024 (558 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The training wheels officially came off Manitoba’s NDP government at 1:30 Wednesday afternoon.

It marked the start of what is really the first full session of the 43rd sitting of the Manitoba legislature, which began last November with a speech from the throne and 14 days of mostly perfunctory proceedings.

Why is this sitting so important? Last fall’s throne speech, and the precious few pieces of legislation introduced in the traditionally truncated fall session, provided little raw material on which to judge the competence of the new government.

Premier Wab Kinew did follow through on a promised gas-tax holiday on Jan. 1 and while it did put some downward pressure on pump prices, the “savings” it was supposed to produce have largely been erased by fluctuations in oil prices and, perhaps, some backfilling by retailers.

The premier also used the fall session to expedite legislation to recognize Métis leader Louis Riel as the honorary first premier of Manitoba and to make Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a statutory holiday. Both are important gestures, but they do not, on their own, define the capacity of the Kinew government.

The same holds true for fiscal management.

Given that Kinew took over in the third quarter of government’s fiscal year, the NDP has largely had to live within the broad strokes of the last spring budget delivered by the Progressive Conservatives. With the NDP now scheduled to table its first budget on April 2, there hasn’t been a huge opportunity for Manitobans to assess the Kinew government’s fiscal acumen.

However, the entrails left behind by the former government start to become less important than decisions made starting this week. In other words, the NDP will have to rely less on vilifying the Tories and more on its own list of accomplishments.

Is Kinew ready for the watershed moment that’s about to occur?

Although there is little hard evidence to go on right now, a handful of issues suggest the Kinew administration is still scaling a pretty steep learning curve. One it will need to ascend before this spring session is over.

The first issue is the apparent reluctance to proceed expeditiously to search the Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg for the remains of two Indigenous women believed to have been slain by an accused serial killer.

In last fall’s election, the former PC government polarized the electorate by running ads celebrating its decision not to spend any taxpayer money to search the landfill. The Tories portrayed that decision as a hallmark of a fiscally responsible government; many outside the party saw it as racist.

Facing a torrent of criticism for those scandalous campaign ads, the Tories tried to flip the tables by alleging that Kinew and his candidates were afraid to commit to searching the landfill. Eventually, the New Democrats did commit, but there was a lingering sense they were concerned about how the issue had polarized the electorate.

Those lingering concerns were amplified this year when the Kinew government refused to release money so that planning, design and equipment procurement for the search can begin. A report from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, which pegged the total cost of a search at roughly $90 million, recommended that $20 million in interim funding should be provided by Feb. 1 to start those preparations.

In response, Kinew said his government remains committed to the search, which he predicted would start sometime before the end of the year. The premier’s statement sparked more than a little unease among Indigenous leaders and the families of the missing women, who viewed Kinew’s vague pledge as little more than kicking a controversial political can down the road.

The second issue of concern was created by the NDP’s ham-handed effort last week to tackle bail reform.

Kinew and Justice Minister Matt Wiebe unveiled a series of funding and policy initiatives to make it tougher for some people accused of crimes to get bail, and make it easier for police to track down and re-incarcerate those who have breached bail conditions.

Critics, including AMC Grand Chief Cathy Merrick and former senator and judge Murray Sinclair, co-commissioner of Manitoba’s landmark Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, assailed the NDP reform package as a backwards and ineffectual way of tackling a complex problem such as management of the bail program.

The critics were not wrong. The NDP’s effort to improve the bail program was shallow and misinformed, which positioned it as an act of political pandering and less of an effort to “reform” a controversial element of the criminal justice system.

Kinew’s missteps on both of these issues could be nothing more than the growing pains that come with learning how to govern.

The most successful governments learn quickly how to get things done while steering clear of self-inflected political wounds; incompetent governments seem satisfied to hop from controversy to controversy without any evidence of knowing how to govern.

Starting this week, Manitobans can start the process of determining in which category the NDP government belongs.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com