Raise a beer for Pallister — he seems like a new man

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2018 (2801 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was not the most important moment to come from last week’s Council of the Federation meeting, but it was still a pretty positive sign for Premier Brian Pallister.

Late in the three-day gathering of Canada’s premiers in Saint Andrews, N.B., Pallister appeared on CBC television to discuss his efforts to encourage the council to adopt freer interprovincial trade rules. To illustrate his point, he took along a case of 24 cans of Farmery beer, a micro-brew from Manitoba well known to the fans of malted beverages.

“My staff brought 24 of these beers to give as gifts to my colleagues,” Pallister said, brandishing a single can of Farmery beer. “If this had been the 25th (can), and I had brought this beer, I could be fined up to $5,000 on a second offence.

“It’s this kind of antiquity we shouldn’t have to face in Canada.”

It was hardly a seminal event in the coverage of the summit meeting. However, it was an informative and entertaining moment for a premier who had generated few positive headlines from his previous interactions with other provincial leaders.

During the past two years, Pallister and many of his ministers largely served as the designated contrarians for the Council of the Federation and other federal-provincial summit meetings. Whether it was health-care funding, carbon tax, cannabis or Canada Pension Plan rules, Manitoba was sure to stand in opposition to someone on something.

On one level, it appeared that the willingness to drop the gloves was Pallister’s way of announcing there was a new sheriff in Manitoba. It was also clearly a strategy to pander to Manitoba voters.

Given that he leads a province with a chronic inferiority complex and a hypersensitivity to criticism from anyone other than those born and bred here, Pallister’s bare-knuckle approach to interprovincial and intergovernmental relations seemed to be an obvious bid to curry favour back home.

However, outside Manitoba, it was never clear that Pallister or his province derived anything positive from the fist-pounding and fretting. For the most part, Pallister appeared to be disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable, a posture that does not win friends or influence peers in critical political summit meetings.

Thankfully, Pallister has been able to pass the mantle of the designated contrarian to Ontario’s newly elected Premier Doug Ford, who, like Pallister two years ago, seems destined to oppose the federal government with extreme prejudice at every turn.

Ford’s first flashpoint is the carbon tax. The former Liberal government of Ontario was committed to a cap-and-trade regime to meet the climate-change demands laid out by the federal Liberal government. Ford also said Ontario would support Saskatchewan on a constitutional long-shot challenge to Ottawa’s threat to impose a carbon tax on any province that does not come up with a comparable program.

Oddly, Pallister becomes one of the greatest beneficiaries of Ford’s war on the carbon tax.

First and foremost, Ford’s bombast allowed Pallister to appear more reasonable and statesman-like, and that’s never a bad look for a first minister. And second, it showed that Pallister had put aside his indiscriminate anger and matured into a viable player on the national stage. That maturity was on display when Ontario pulled the trigger on a misleading tweet that put Manitoba in an awkward position.

It started when the Ontario delegation announced via Twitter that Pallister was joining the carbon tax court challenge. The original tweet showed a photograph of Pallister and Ford shaking hands. It went on to congratulate Pallister for “his government’s commitment to working together to ensure that no carbon tax plan is ever imposed on the people of our great provinces.”

Manitoba has produced its own carbon tax plan, one that falls short of the upper limits of the federal tax. Abandoning that plan in favour of a tenuous legal challenge would have been a huge story. Except that it wasn’t true.

The tweet from Ontario was taken down shortly after it was posted. When asked about the erroneous tweet, Pallister was the picture of cool and calm.

“What you have to do there is give Premier Ford a break,” Pallister said during the TV interview. “I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it, I would simply ask for you to give consideration to a fact that this (is) a brand new team of people, just come together, and they’re doing the best they can with the learning curve we all go through in life.”

Well played. Pallister set the record straight without a disparaging word sent in Ontario’s direction.

That may seem like a simple matter, but this is a premier who has rarely travelled the easy route on any issue during his first two years in office.

The premier’s propensity to blurt out controversial things, start fights when they don’t need to be started and run into difficulty handling some of the more nuanced aspects of his job generated way too much of the opposition’s ammunition.

For this brief moment, he seems like a new man, as evidenced by his beer-inspired performance art.

An earlier iteration of Pallister might have taken that 25th beer to New Brunswick and dared the local constabulary to get him.

The new-and-improved Pallister knew enough to stop at 24. And that’s not a small accomplishment.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca