Pallister portrait shows more of the man

Salvador Dali once said, “The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.” This cannot be said of Manitoba’s 22nd premier, Brian Pallister. His official portrait by artist Andrew Valko doesn’t just resemble Pallister, it reveals him.

It reveals not just who he is but more, someone far different than the public portrait many Manitobans had of him.

Begin with the setting. Manitoba’s most outdoors premier has the first outdoors portrait of a premier.

Significantly, he chose not where he worked — the formal pediments and stone of the province’s legislative building which form the preferred backdrop of all his predecessors — but where he lived and loved, the landscape of Manitoba itself. High Bluff, part of his hometown municipality of Portage la Prairie, with the Assiniboine River gently wending its way in the background, fills the canvas. It cries out roots and belonging, not position or status.

The Manitoba Legislative Building is famously replete with masonic symbols deliberately hidden in plain sight by its architect, Frank Worthington Simon. Most official portraits of premiers and prime ministers are studded with details to something they did in office or their upbringing, painted into the official setting. You are invited to peer closely at a usually younger version of the subject and ascertain the muted public significance of those artifacts.

Not so the Pallister portrait. There is no hidden meaning, no Da Vinci Code-esque symbolism or divine meaning to distract from the subject. It is authentic in its simplicity and clarity.

A history buff, Pallister read widely, especially local lore stories which formed, for him, part of the provincial story.

To say he loved Manitoba is an understatement. Driving with Pallister anywhere in Manitoba was one long history and geography soliloquy. He relished teaching anyone within earshot about how one community came to being, a business was established, a family who moved in and seemingly every sport accomplishment by anyone during the past 50 years. He just knew it.

Driving with him one day to Portage, he side-stepped onto an interminable gravel road that concluded at an old church and graveyard. We stepped out from the warm sun into the cool church nave in silence. For Pallister, this was a living place of memory where Manitobans had broken earth, raised families and formed the quiet, unspoken narrative of the province’s rich history. Walking amongst the gravestones, he pointed out one Manitoba name after another and connected their forebears to an accomplishment or a family today.

It was a caring attention to the small details of how life had ticked along, and his province had grown. For an outsider, it made Manitoba and, more importantly, Manitobans, real. While this comfortable rooting in the past made him seem less contemporary or modern to others, to Pallister it was a natural respect for what had come before.

A favourite thinker of his was Aldo Leopold, an American naturalist, wilderness conservationist and philosopher who wrote about “thinking like a mountain.” It informed his strong funding commitment for conservation and wetland preservation initiatives and, yes, his concern for climate change and what it would bring in the future.

Next, look at the pose.

Serene and confident, hands comfortably resting in his pockets, his suit jacket rumpling in response. That too is nothing like the combative, hard-charging, even angry political portrait that was made of him. But it reflects his inherent comfort on matters of principle and conscience.

Indeed, he was immovable as those of us who tried repeatedly experienced. Pallister was tenaciously goal oriented. His principal goals were to balance the budget and reduce taxes. He refused to deviate, and accomplished both.

Pallister’s conservatism was genuine and deep and different from others. He considered himself a “blue collar conservative not a blue blood conservative.” That this made him unpopular in some quarters of the traditional Progressive Conservative Party was irrelevant to him.

Similarly, he believed government programs should never substitute for hard work or personal accomplishment. He had succeeded from relatively poor beginnings and felt anyone else could succeed too with hard work and perseverance.

Still, he knew the right kind of help at the right time in a person’s life mattered, as it had for him. That’s why over many years, he quietly contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a scholarship fund at his alma mater, Brandon University. He only mentioned this once publicly, two days before he officially resigned, when he made a further $260,000 scholarship endowment in the name of his sister, who had passed away during the pandemic, and which had affected him deeply.

Finally, take in the setting sun. To some it might suggest a workday or career satisfactorily complete. But for this quintessential Manitoban, he and his artist are drawing your eye to the limitless horizon that frames the provincial landscape as you drive or gaze across farms, fields and streams.

Looking beyond the horizon is transformative and Brian Pallister sought to be a transformative premier. That led him to attempt controversial reform on everything from health care to education to how government spends.

Too tall to be overlooked and too driven to be ignored in life, his premier’s portrait resembles and reveals an authentic Manitoba life.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.