As a defender of Pallister’s disastrous legacy, loyal soldier makes a pretty good comedian

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2023 (750 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’m not sure why anyone would try to rehabilitate the tattered legacy of former premier Brian Pallister. Most ardent Tories I know either couldn’t wait for him to resign from office, or helped push him out the door.

It took only four years for Pallister to begin his precipitous fall from grace after his party’s landslide victory in 2016. Even though he was re-elected in 2019, the toxic environment he created in government and the ruinous impact he had on Manitoba started to catch up with him the following year. By the summer of 2021, he hit rock-bottom and was quietly shown the door before he could do any more damage. Almost nobody has seen him since.

Former Progressive Conservative party campaign manager David McLaughlin, who was rewarded by Pallister with a patronage appointment as clerk of executive council in 2020 (the top bureaucratic job in government), has taken the first — and maybe the last — crack at trying to repair the former premier’s tarnished reputation.

It’s not unusual for partisans to try to whitewash the failed records of their former political leaders and recast them into some fantasy image. Even by partisan standards, though, McLaughlin’s revisionist history of Pallister is absurd.

“(Pallister’s) party leadership chops and his commitment and his discipline, his convictions — all the things that perhaps some people thought might be too much in government — they were exactly what was needed to get the party into government,” McLaughlin said in a recent interview with the Free Press.

A ferret could have been the leader of the PC party in 2016 and won the provincial election that year. Former NDP premier Greg Selinger had become so unpopular, his party’s electoral loss was a foregone conclusion. Pallister just happened to be next in line for the transfer of power.

By the time the COVID-19 outbreak hit four years later, Pallister was already rivalling Selinger in unpopularity, mostly because of his indiscriminate cuts to front-line services and his poorly conceived revamp of the health-care system. His disastrous handling of the pandemic, his racist remarks about vaccine distributions among First Nations and his twisted views of colonialism, coupled with his abrasive and combative style of governing, drove his level of support to even greater depths.

McLaughlin seems to suggest Pallister was merely an unfortunate victim of a legitimate attempt to a shake up a system in need of reform.

“I think Brian Pallister was the biggest change agent the government of Manitoba has seen in perhaps decades, maybe ever, and I think change agents are naturally disruptive to the status quo,” McLaughlin told the Free Press.

Pallister was certainly disruptive, but not in a productive or beneficial way. He was a bull in china shop. He took advice from no one and imposed his will on everyone around him. His so-called reforms were neither thoughtful nor well designed.

Pallister was reckless, arrogant and had zero interest in collaborating with others. It was the Brian Pallister show, and if you didn’t like it, you were free to go elsewhere. That’s been corroborated many times over by people who worked with him.

McLaughlin’s view that there was virtue in that approach to governing is ludicrous.

“He believed that the province would prosper and gain if government was fixed,” said McLaughlin.

Pallister’s idea of “fixing” government was to indiscriminately lop off entire sections of the civil service, regardless of its impact on the operational integrity of a department or division. None of it was driven by objective, evidence-based decision making. In at least one case, an entirely new level of bureaucracy was created, Shared Health, which could be more tightly controlled by the premier’s office. Most of those changes still exist under the current Tory regime.

Whatever Pallister dreamed up on any given day — whether it was an ill-advised plan to eliminate school boards, or a half-baked scheme to run roughshod over a public regulator (such as the Public Utilities Board) — became official government policy. Everyone had to toe the line.

“Brian came in with a particular view on government and you can agree or disagree, but his view on government was consistently held,” McLaughlin said.

It was consistently self-serving, erratic and ultimately harmful to Manitoba, which is why the former premier fell out of favour with the public after only four years in office.

Pallister didn’t resign in 2021 to protect the long-term interests of his political party, as McLaughlin suggests. The former premier didn’t care a whit about the PC party of Manitoba. He dismantled much of its inner workings while he served as its head. He left government and the party because his presence became intolerable.

Pallister was an extremely insecure politician with unresolved issues that manifested themselves in very destructive ways. He wanted desperately to be accepted and praised. When he didn’t get the external validation he sought, and when his own caucus eventually turned on him (after five years of enabling his self-serving agenda), he left.

He picked up his toys, sold his mansion on Wellington Crescent and walked away.

His was a calamitous period in government. There’s no way of sugar-coating it.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca