The tired election cycle

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This article was published 21/09/2023 (964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 12 days, the long slog known as our provincial election campaign, will be over. The writ period of 28 days does enforce certain rules for political campaigns. But the opportunity for politicians to be political and for media scribblers to record the daily drip drip, is interminably long.

For those of us who pay attention to the news, we’d have to be kidding ourselves to think the real campaign didn’t begin long before the writ period. Imagine a world where we endure political attacks for only 28 days every four years. The sad truth is that by the time the formal campaign rolls around, we are mentally exhausted.

For anyone who has grown up in a home where you know that a fight between parents and or siblings may break out any moment, the only way to survive the family feud is to find ways of tuning out.

You almost automatically discount most of the accusations, the threats and the counter-threats. If you try to be a peacemaker, you can find the players on all sides of every argument turning on you. Sometimes you walk out the door, looking for fresh air and peace of mind. At other times you simply find a room to hide in, where you can pump up the volume on the TV or your phone. I wish I were describing a fantasy.

But the sad truth is political fights over the same old same old issues are for many of us, a painful reminder of everything we don’t want to be reminded of. It’s no wonder so many of us respond by tuning it all out and deciding that none of the shouters are to be believed.

Years before the official 2023 campaign, we were reminded of the Pallister government’s decision made thousands of news cycles ago to accept a consultant’s recommendation to transform emergency care to urgent care at three Winnipeg hospitals, Seven Oaks, Concordia and Victoria.

Never mind that the consultant had been hired by the previous NDP government.

Never mind that the transformation never meant that people in North and South Winnipeg were now without access to emergency medicine.

Never mind that not a single day goes by without people being brought by ambulance to those facilities and getting treatment.

Never mind that we have no data to back up the political implication that we have a bloodbath in Winnipeg because people aren’t receiving professional and reliable acute care.

Think about it. If we were witnessing such a bloodbath, wouldn’t we be hearing real stories from friends and family?

Wouldn’t the esteemed pages of this newspaper be loaded with these stories? Wouldn’t politicians wanting to convict the government have specific stories to tell of people of dying because it’s 911 time and nobody is answering the bell?

But in the absence of that stark reality we have the tedious neverending din about Pallister and the three emergency wards and the shallow promise that they will be resurrected if the government returns to the hands of the party that lost power two elections ago.

My open question to any voter is this. Do you think your fellow Manitobans are losing their lives because emergency care is unavailable to them?

The Pallister government’s decision on emergency wards is only one of several storylines that build voter fatigue. There is the business of the personal biography of the NDP Leader, Wab Kinew. If you’re someone who started paying attention long before the writ was dropped, how much more talk can you sustain on Wab Kinew’s ancient police file? How many more explanations does one need about the human condition?

People mature and change. This actually happens in real life.

Wab Kinew has paid the price for his past behaviour. Manitobans can decide whether or not they trust him at the premier’s desk. But all of us can acknowledge that the NDP leader does not belong in a cage. And those who wish to rhetorically put him there are guilty of pumping fumes into an already exhausted democracy.

This is my formal request for a positive political vision. It’s not an emergency.

But it is urgent.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com