Political attacks versus long-term damage

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This article was published 24/06/2023 (847 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“NDP, Tories tied in province-wide voter support: poll,” Free Press headline, June 20, 2023.

If you’re a Manitoba grown-up, you can’t be surprised by the headline. It reflects reality.

Manitoba PCs are now tied with the NDP at 41 per cent. Probe Polling data shows support for the NDP peaked before Christmas of last year and has been on an uninterrupted downward slope since then. Politically, that’s peaking far too early for the NDP challengers.

The poll was released on the same day that we discovered that, despite all the obituaries being written for the Trudeau Liberals, they were very much alive. Real voters said so in four byelections.

If this week’s exercise in democracy teaches us anything, it is to never presume voters alter political feelings as frequently as media moments would have us believe.

And I’m presenting this with bloodstained hands.

As a talk show host for three decades, I was the short order cook, greasing a skillet containing two key ingredients: the story of the day and my opinion. These meals were high in fat and sodium. So while they were tasty, they were not necessarily nutritious.

I rarely said to the audience, “Oh, by the way, it’s unlikely anything you’re hearing will affect the outcome of the next election.” I was never hosing down the pan. My job was to cook the meal — not to kill it. In the game of rhetoric, tasty becomes soggy if you’re not paying attention.

In this week’s Free Press story on the big rebound for the PCs, political science professor Chris Adams was quoted saying, “I think the premier has not been making the same mistakes in public she was earlier.” The reporter said Adams was “referring to an incident when Premier Heather Stefanson boasted about her son’s hockey team’s win when asked a question by the NDP about the failed attempt to transfer a COVID-19 patient to an Ontario hospital before she died.”

For those who watched the clip, it created a negative impression — but not necessarily a lasting one. It was a low point, for sure. The premier’s performance had to get better than that. Professor Adams says it has, and he’s right.

The brutality of a clip that you see is often what you don’t see. It is without context. On that day, the premier was being confronted by NDP Leader Wab Kinew about the tragic death of a young woman. He wanted to pin the health-care transportation mistake on the premier.

Kinew asked the same question the same way for multiple question periods. He was hoping that, sooner or later, the premier might get lulled into answering inappropriately. He was fishing for an embarrassing clip.

And the premier took the bait. She became distracted by the Opposition leader’s robotic routine. So she chose to change the subject and talk about the prowess of her son’s hockey team. The clip was the catch of the season for Kinew. It serviced the NDP/public sector union script on Conservatives. Their message never changes. When it comes to health care, they will tell you the PCs are nasty.

Ironically, the reason the premier got into trouble was because she lacks a nasty streak.

In any radio discussion, if Kinew was trying to pin me like so many have, as a conservative lacking compassion for common people, my blue-collar blood would have taken the hook he was baiting and stuck it right in his eye. I would have given his fishing expedition a pail of Arctic char.

Manitobans have a choice, I would say to the listeners. Of course, Kinew, like any human being, cares about the tragic death of a young woman. But it’s one thing to care about it and it’s another thing to exploit the death for political gain. I strongly object to Kinew using her death as a partisan political prop. I would have looked him right in the eye and said Manitobans can make up their own minds, but to my mind, Mr. Kinew, I find your politics of character assassination unworthy of public trust.

In the coming months I don’t expect Premier Stefanson to be as nasty as I am when an opponent is trolling for my reputation.

But I do expect her to remind voters how destructive the NDP was to the Manitoba economy only seven years ago.

Unless people think the leopard has changed its spots, the current trend will remain a friend of the Manitoba PCs.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com