MPI’s unexpected U-turn

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2023 (785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Think of it this way: if you were taking your driver’s road test, put your turn signal on to turn right, and then did an unexpected left-hand U-turn across Portage during rush hour, you’d fail. (You’d probably have to pry the examiner’s fingers out of the dashboard, too.)

Well, someone at MPI — or maybe someone higher up the food chain — did a move like that on Thursday, and, in the process, probably failed their public communications test.

At 2 p.m. on Thursday, Ward Keith, the chair of MPI’s board of directors, confirmed that the public insurer was moving ahead with its plans to give licences to new drivers who had successfully completed the Driver Z driver’s education program, without having to take the driver’s road test.

The problem is that the examiners who give the road tests to new drivers are among the unionized MPI workers who went on strike a week ago.

That’s a decision that is seemingly at odds with regulations under The Driver and Vehicles Act that state “an applicant for any class of licence must pass the knowledge examination and the practical road test required for each class of licence for which application is made.” When it comes to the legal language of regulations, “must” establishes the test is not optional. So the regulations would have to be changed in order for the road test exemption to go ahead, meaning the governing PCs — already campaigning on how unreasonable Manitoba Liquour and Lotteries and MPI workers are for not accepting early wage offers — would have to step in and change the regulations.

But then, something else happened.

By 5 p.m. on Thursday, MPI had taken a full U-turn without flashing anything like a signal, issuing a news release reinstating the road test.

The suggestion that the driving test is a live political issue during the current pre-election election campaign is an obvious one.

Because it certainly seems like there are political fingers in the pie.

For example, if you go to the MPI website’s link to learn what to do about a road test, you first have to scroll through several screens of MPI’s summary of its offer to employees: eventually, you reach a section that reads, “MPI’s strong and valued relationships with our driver instructor partners enable us to resume testing as early as Sept. 5 in Winnipeg, and in rural locations soon after.” MPI is contacting new drivers directly to reschedule their appointments.

It’s passing strange that the province’s public insurer would feel the need to make its bargaining case to people checking the MPI website: it’s a downright political play in itself. It also reads, in its entirety, a bit like “our greedy public employees bad, ‘strong and valued’ private sector partners good.”

But to get back to the question of whether to road-test or not to road-test.

What are we to make of the fact that the chair of the board of MPI was seemingly oblivous, only a handful of hours earlier, that the driver’s test policy was about to change again?

It’s an embarrassingly uninformed spot for Keith to find himself in.

Or perhaps it wasn’t a decision that was his to make.

Premier Heather Stefanson has been blunt in saying that the union representing both Manitoba Liquour and MPI employees has been shrugging off good deals and playing politics in the process. In other words, that helping a political party (the NDP) was playing a role in in the union’s handling of possible deals.

Maybe there are different political hands at play now at MPI. Stefanson was the first to raise the spectre of politics in contract negotiations: maybe, as the saying goes, it takes one to know one.