Single-focus campaign left NDP asleep at the wheel

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2019 (2601 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The campaign signs are coming down, and candidates — both successful and those who were not-so-much — are cleaning out their campaign offices. Newly elected MLAs are getting ready to be sworn in to what will perhaps be the most difficult and rewarding job of their lifetimes.

Manitoba’s Election 2019 is finished, and no doubt strategists from all parties will look at the data and crunch numbers to figure out where things went wrong and what went right.

The Progressive Conservatives and Premier Brian Pallister did a great job on this campaign, in terms of strategy, from the very beginning. An election call in the summer, when no one was paying attention and when a significant number of the province’s health-care unions were fighting amongst themselves, was brilliant. Had they waited another year, the Conservatives might not have had similar conditions plus a positive economy. Going to the polls a year early was a good risk to take, and it paid off for the PCs with 36 seats.

For the New Democratic Party under leader Wab Kinew, it was a gamble to run a campaign on a single election issue: health care. That the strategy didn’t give power back to the NDP was no surprise, as Manitobans don’t normally look to change governments after just one term. But it also didn’t deliver any huge NDP breakthroughs in Winnipeg.

The 18 seats won by the NDP might be enough for Kinew to stave off a potential leadership review, but there’s still a chance the knives will come out. As anyone in politics knows, internal strife can be more lethal for the Opposition than anything the governing party can throw at it while it’s waiting for its turn to reclaim power.

The NDP and Kinew dropped the ball in this election in one big way: no matter how many times Kinew tried to raise the alarm that health care was in crisis, the concern would be undermined when the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority released statistics saying that emergency room wait times were going down.

Bottom line: health care may have been important to some people, but for the most part, the crisis described by Kinew was of the manufactured variety, largely because the political opposition and unions made it that way. For most of us, health care hasn’t been a concern. The polling numbers backed that up, over and over again. Just because the NDP cried, “Crisis!” didn’t make it so.

By maintaining their singular focus, Kinew and the NDP also missed a huge opportunity — particularly in week 3 of the election — that might have affected the outcome. Someone in the New Democrat camp fell asleep at the wheel and didn’t pivot fast enough, and that potentially cost them.

I’m talking about the announcement by Pallister of a plan to fundamentally alter the foundation of Manitoba’s public school divisions.

This was the striking announcement made by Pallister in a Sept. 3 release: “Manitoba has one of the most complicated and uneven education property tax regimes in the country. Education property taxes will be phased out — saving homeowners thousands of dollars each year on their property tax bill when fully implemented.”

As Free Press columnist Tom Brodbeck smartly asked in a followup column, if those taxes are eliminated, what happens to school divisions in this province and, more to the point, to all those (too many, in my mind) school board trustees? Well, you couldn’t look to the NDP for answers on this one, because the party and its leader didn’t even consider the question. Pallister’s proposal represents a huge and fundamental change to education policy in this province, and Kinew and his NDP cohorts failed to address this issue.

You only have to look to Ontario and Alberta to see the concerns created with the Conservative controls being applied to curriculums and cutbacks to services for special-needs students. A complete revamping of the school divisions? This was an election issue just waiting to explode on the Pallister team, and Kinew let it pass with virtually no response.

Education had already been on the radar in Manitoba before the writ was dropped. The province had announced, prior to the election call, that it was committed to a broad review of the education system — the first since Duff Roblin was premier.

An education commission was formed under then-education minister Kelvin Goertzen at the beginning of this year, tasked with examining school boards, unions and literacy rates. It’s expected to hold public hearings once the new government is sworn in later this month.

How no one in the NDP camp saw this as a fundamental issue for pushback during the campaign boggles the mind.

It was a missed opportunity. What remains to be seen is whether it will come back to haunt the NDP and Kinew, if he sticks around as leader.

Giving Pallister another four years with a sizable majority means he’s been given carte blanche to do what he wants. And when he turns his attention to education, you’ll be reminded how the NDP was asleep at the wheel.

Shannon Sampert is a retired political scientist and a consultant.

s.sampert@uwinnipeg.ca

Twitter: @paulysigh