Tough time to be a Manitoba NDPer

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/07/2015 (3749 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the spring session of the Manitoba legislature comes to an end, it appears quite obvious now that in all of Canadian politics, there is no government facing more problems than Manitoba’s NDP government.

After nearly 16 years in power and four consecutive majority mandates the NDP finds itself bloodied by internal strife, riddled with controversy and saddled with a middling economy and a stubborn budget deficit. The most recent results from a Free Press-Probe Research poll show the NDP firmly rooted in second place, 17 points down from the front-running Progressive Conservatives.

When you add it all up, these are not good or easy times to be a Manitoba New Democrat.

None of this is particularly surprising. As the NDP stares down an election in April 2016, the governing party is discovering that in politics, winning a fourth majority is a mixed blessing.

Long-serving governments tend to lose their political instincts. They no longer have the ability to forge strategy or anticipate public sentiment. Once all that happens, tired governments also lose their ability to communicate with the public.

For the NDP government in Manitoba, this phenomenon might have started with a decision to introduce a one-point sales-tax increase to fund infrastructure. Raising taxes is always a dicey proposition, but Premier Greg Selinger was so poorly prepared to make the case for raising the sales tax — he imposed the decision on his cabinet just two weeks before the 2013 budget was tabled — it took more than a year before Manitobans heard a coherent case for the hike.

That may be where Selinger first showed Manitobans he was losing his ability to forge a strategy and anticipate public reaction. But it was not the last, as the recently completed spring legislative session has shown us.

After introducing a budget in April, the Selinger government was actually pretty darn busy. Depending on how you wanted to account for new policies and laws, the NDP government dealt with about three dozen reasonably important issues in this past session.

The highlights included: new provisions to force deadbeat parents to pay child support; enhanced family benefits when someone providing care to infirm children or adults is killed in an automobile collision; an increase in rent subsidies to people living on social assistance; funding to support the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s National Research Centre at the University of Manitoba; and a new law recognizing post-traumatic stress disorder as an occupational disease. All that and millions of dollars of infrastructure projects.

This government even introduced provisions to allow tasting rooms in craft breweries and raised the speed limit on twinned sections of the Trans-Canada Highway to 110 kilometres per hour. That is pretty effective populist policy.

And yet, history will show hardly any of those efforts got more than token media coverage or public attention. Unfortunately for New Democrats, the spring session will be remembered for controversy, more ugly infighting and an almost chronic inability to express itself when it really counts.

It’s probably not surprising Selinger has been unable to right the ship after being forced to endure a historic challenge to his leadership at a party convention in March. The internal struggle over control of the party cost him five senior cabinet ministers and a lot of face with the electorate.

Selinger no doubt hoped once he won back his leadership his troubles would be over. Unfortunately, the political gods had other plans.

The budget was underwhelming and muddled. A big part of the problem was new Finance Minister Greg Dewar, who self-destructed in spectacular fashion while trying to explain changes to the province’s accounting practices for reporting government finances. His stammering, tightly scripted manner made the summary-versus-core debate arcane code for “he’s trying to hide something.”

Once back in session, things went from bad to worse.

Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross badly bungled the rollout of a plan to get Child and Family Services wards out of hotel rooms. At the news conference, she was forced to admit she didn’t actually know how many CFS wards were being kept in rural hotels. She, and her government, looked incompetent.

Almost concurrently, Selinger was forced to defend a decision to pay more than $670,000 in severance to political staffers he fired because they supported other candidates in the leadership campaign.

Then the session was rocked by the revelation the Manitoba ombudsman was investigating cabinet minister Steve Ashton for trying to push through a $5-million untendered contract to purchase mobile flood-fighting equipment for Interlake First Nations. Ashton had political relationships with both the vendor of the equipment and the First Nation spearheading the purchase. Even worse, the vendor and First Nation have close business relationships. It all added up to one big, fat, hairy conflict of interest.

The tie that binds all of these controversies together is a governing party in which key players — both politicians and staff — are not communicating effectively with the public, or with each other.

This lack of communication is plainly evident in the poorly planned, shoddy announcements that make Selinger’s ministers look like they either don’t know their portfolios, or they’re hiding something, or both.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but the lion’s share must rest with Selinger. Some of his most strident supporters admit the premier did actually stop communicating with key members of his cabinet last year when several ministers openly challenged him, first internally and then later, out in public.

Talk to enough people inside the NDP, and what you hear are stories about a premier who has become an island, cut off by his own hand from any meaningful dialogue with his cabinet or caucus.

Selinger and his supporters may believe there is no point in engaging people who oppose you. And while that is somewhat true, political leaders do not have the luxury of operating in a vacuum. They must keep working with the people they lead or risk losing all support.

New Democrats will lament the fact that all their good work in the last session — and there was some good stuff brought forward — was ignored in favour of a string of controversies and missteps that made for better headlines

But when you look at all of those controversies and missteps, it’s hard to ignore an inescapable fact.

They have only themselves to blame

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @danlett