Election has barely started and I’m already fed up

Transcona

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/09/2023 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I love these last days of summer. The morning air is crisp, but not cold, my garden is providing me with more tomatoes than I know what to do with, and I have a particular fondness for sweater weather. Unfortunately, these ephemeral weeks of temperate weather will be filled with what promises to be the most uninspired election campaign this province has seen in years.

Early signs of the election have, for months, been popping up on billboards, benches, and the radio, with the Progressive Conservatives under Heather Stefanson claiming that a New Democrat government would cause an increase in violent crime. This is a ballsy claim, since rates of violent crime in Manitoba have skyrocketed since the Tories took office in 2016. In fact, the provincially funded billboards reading “Fighting Crime” and “Tracking violent criminals” feature a stock photo of an ankle bracelet, despite the fact that when Stefanson was justice minister during Brian Pallister’s reign as premier, she ended the electronic monitoring program because an NDP-initiated review found it was ineffective. Stefanson told CBC in 2017 that in “50 per cent of cases they were either tampered with or cut off,” and ending the program would save the province $100,000. In an about-face, her current justice minister, Kelvin Goertzen is reviving the program, with a $500,000 price tag, not including staffing costs.

This tough-on-crime rhetoric has, of course, forced NDP leader and easiest political punching bag in Manitoba, Wab Kinew, to announce that an NDP government would also be tough on crime. Kinew told an audience of Tuxedo NDP supporters in mid-August that he will “never defund the police,” which is a shame, because divesting resources from bloated and inefficient police forces would at least imply some vision on the part of the NDP. Looking at municipal politics for a moment, Winnipeg’s police force currently eats more than a quarter of the city budget annually, and consumes more each year.

At present, Manitobans are faced with the choice between two parties who have demonstrated only the capacity to blame each other for their own failings, and then copy each others’ notes. The PC platform is obsessed with the “what ifs” of an NDP victory, and the NDP is wasting time challenging conservative fearmongering by playing to centre-right swing voters instead of championing a new vision for the province.

At least my garden looks promising.