Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION
Former Manitoba NDP premier Gary Doer was many things during his stint in public office.
He could be a union man when he needed union co-operation. He managed to build a reasonably cordial relationship with the province’s business community.
Even his political rivals, the Progressive Conservatives, had — and still have — a grudging respect for his skills as an effective and intelligent politician who was able to bring many views to the table.
That kind of pragmatism also served him — and this province — well when dealing with the federal government, whether it was Liberal or Conservative in nature. It also convinced the federal Conservatives to look past labels and ideology and hand him the post of Canada’s ambassador to the United States. Pragmatism has its perks.
It’s a lesson, however, that our current premier, Greg Selinger, has not learned.
Consider: The 2012 Manitoba budget states that federal transfers in 2010-11 accounted for between 14 and 41 per cent of total revenue in each province. In that same fiscal year, about 31 per cent of Manitoba’s total summary revenue was related to federal transfers.
That’s a huge amount of money that we as Manitobans rely on to make our government work and pay the bills — or in our province’s case, lower the amount of total debt we accrue year over year. As a have not province, we are unfortunately highly reliant upon federal transfers and equalization payments.
So what does Premier Selinger do? He pokes the bear in the eye with a stick. Repeatedly.
When the federal government announced it was planning to introduce legislation to eliminate the Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk monopoly, Selinger went on the offensive.
In June of last year, Selinger launched a campaign to “save the Canadian Wheat Board” — and the 400-plus jobs headquartered in Winnipeg — a move which prompted an angry response from federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, who accused Manitoba of ignoring the will of most farmers.
While we happen to believe the Tories should have respected a democratic farmer plebiscite on the matter, a pragmatist would have at least tried to sit down with the federal government in a more conciliatory way to try to save the majority of those jobs. To our knowledge, that never happened.
Lo and behold, The Canadian Press now reports that the CWB is cutting about three-quarters of its staff, whittling down to 100 personnel by the end of this year, from 430 at the start of 2011.
And when federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced that the Tories were pulling out of a decade-old deal with Manitoba for settlement services or immigrants, Selinger publicly expressed his anger at the situation rather than trying to reason with the federal government in private.
We can respect that the man has ideals, but playing the ideologue and never the pragmatist is simply not helping this province.
Granted, the federal Tories have shown that they are not ones to play nice with the other parties on the political landscape. The days of honourable federal statesmen are quickly disappearing, replaced instead with grudges, rancour, and hyper-partisanship. And as Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett ably pointed out on Wednesday, federal ministers have been picking fights with their counterparts in other provinces as well.
While it may well take a change in government to improve relations between Manitoba and the feds, we still have three more years to go before voters go to the polls for either level of government.
Three. Long. Years.
In the meantime, we never know when the next big drought, flood, trade dispute, or worthwhile community building project — think Brandon’s Dome Building or the waste-water treatment plant — will require us to look for help from our federal government.
Mr. Selinger, can we please tone down the rhetoric for a bit? If nothing else, think of it as doing yourself a favour. As we have seen firsthand, pragmatists tend to win more battles than they lose. They also tend to hang around for awhile.
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition May 10, 2012
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Former Manitoba NDP premier Gary Doer was many things during his stint in public office.
He could be a union man when he needed union co-operation. He managed to build a reasonably cordial relationship with the province’s business community.
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Former Manitoba NDP premier Gary Doer was many things during his stint in public office.
He could be a union man when he needed union co-operation. He managed to build a reasonably cordial relationship with the province’s business community.
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Posted by:Bill the Needle
May 11, 2012 at 7:30 AM
Manitoba's pugulist premier gets us all punished as he plays provocative with the PMO.