Ignoring Manitoba’s past at their peril

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2023 (729 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Tory campaign failed to engage Manitobans because the people running it forgot who we are.

The decision not to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of Indigenous women Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris seemed bizarre when it was announced this summer.

The decision to double-down with advertising defending the decision in the final days of the campaign seemed even stranger, because Manitobans are hardwired to care and correct. It’s in our DNA.

We have a very long history of doing the right things, at the right time, for the right reasons. It’s what makes us real.

A few examples. In 1933 Winnipeg elected a communist city councillor Jacob Penner and kept electing him right through the McCarthyism era of the United States until 1960, making him the longest serving elected Communist city councillor in North America. That’s Winnipeg for you.

Manitoba appointed its first First Nations associate chief judge Murray Sinclair in 1988, when the nation was still incredibly naïve about residential schools.

Winnipeg elected the first openly gay mayor in North America, Glen Murray in 1998, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic when gays were being vilified.

And this week Manitoba elected the first First Nations premier in all of Canada just as a nation is grappling with truth so that it can eventually move to reconciliation.

How did we do this?

Because it’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning. It’s who we are.

Manitoba was the first in Canada to grant (some) women the vote in 1916.

We held the largest strike in Canadian history in 1919 when 30,000 workers walked off the job to improve working conditions.

Two years later, we created the first community foundation in Canada in 1921 that now gives millions back to Winnipeg non-profits every year. There are now over 200 community foundations across Canada modelled after it.

Manitoba welcomed everyone from Hutterites and Mennonites to Vietnamese boat people to Syrian and Ukrainian refugees looking for safety and they became our neighbours, our friends and our relatives.

In 1994 we created the first women’s television network (WTN) in the world and a few years later, the first Indigenous television network (APTN) in the world.

And in 2014 we opened the first national museum outside of the National Capital Region, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, when everyone said it was impossible.

This cultural history is inked into our DNA.

It’s what the Winnipeg slogan “Made from what’s REAL” tries to capture.

And when politicians and communication leads don’t deeply know our history or know it and don’t think it matters, they are doomed to make the same mistakes we saw the Tory campaign make this year and assume that being firm, unmovable, and inflexible is what works here.

It might work in small corners for a fraction of society. But largely Manitobans see that attitude and might be curious about where it comes from and where it is going but will politely and quietly turn away.

When the Tory government announced it would not be searching the landfill, I was curious and thought, “Wow, they must know something I don’t know because it looks like people are thoughtfully and carefully listening and talking about this.” It was coming up in every conversation in measured ways. And it certainly seemed this summer that Manitobans were leaning into the issue with their full hearts and minds.

So why would you stake a party’s reputation on something that is so tender in this time of truth and reconciliation based on the idea it wasn’t safe, when every day we suit up firefighters, police officers and soldiers and send them into really dangerous and uncontrolled situations without a guarantee they will accomplish their duty?

And then in September, a Probe Research poll commissioned by the Winnipeg Free Press and CTV confirmed it. Probe found that 47 per cent of respondents were in favour of searching the landfill, compared to 45 per cent who were opposed. The remaining eight per cent were undecided. Here was the quantifiable evidence that the community was working through it.

That led many of us to think the Tory campaign will pause. But down at Tory HQ, the efforts by some to reverse course — or at least press the pause button — were ignored. Instead, the campaign released ads and billboards that charged forward trying to eke out a couple more votes from small corners of angry constituents.

Someone did not understand this community. Did not understand it is built on a foundation of caring and correcting course.

I heard it best from one 30-something voter who has voted for almost every party in Canada. She voted NDP this time for the first time, but she said was not voting for herself. “I’m voting for other people,” she told me. Her Manitoba DNA kicked in.

And she adds she has friends coming back from Ontario, Alberta and BC because they need to get back to a place they feel is more “real.”

Welcome home. We’re getting more real all the time.

Shirley Muir is president of The PRHouse.