Doer’s counsel invaluable for Kinew, trouble for the Tories

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This article was published 08/03/2024 (913 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s never a great thing for Manitoba Tories when the NDP makes a shift to the political right.

The last time that happened, the Tories were out of office for 17 years.

It’s happening again under NDP Premier Wab Kinew, who has taken a page out of former NDP premier Gary Doer’s political playbook. Doer, who served as Manitoba premier from 1999 to 2009, was a master of assessing the political landscape and delivering a legislative agenda that appealed to a broad range of voters.

The former premier was faithful to his NDP roots when it came to labour legislation and the party’s aversion to privatizing public services. But he also balanced the books, cut taxes (he eliminated the small business tax, something he rarely gets credit for) and ensured his justice ministers regularly trotted out Tory-style “tough on crime” agendas to appeal to the right-of-centre crowd. It worked. Voters in south Winnipeg and parts of southern rural Manitoba, normally fertile PC party ground, were putty in his hands.

It wasn’t until Doer’s successor, former premier Greg Selinger, took the helm and made a giant leap to the political left that the NDP reign came crashing down. Selinger unleashed a series of high-tax, fiscal expansionist policies that scared the daylights out of the voters Doer spent his political career courting. Selinger unravelled a decade of carefully planned, meticulously crafted political strategy.

Kinew doesn’t want to make that mistake.

It’s the main reason he is supporting the former Tory government’s tax cuts and why he brought in tax relief of his own in the form of a temporary fuel tax holiday. He plans to maintain the Tories’ income tax cuts that came into effect Jan. 1, and has pledged to extend their education property tax rebates.

Kinew has also embraced a Tory-style tough-on-crime agenda that’s designed solely to shore up support among non-traditional NDP voters.

The premier last week announced a series of so-called bail-reform initiatives whose main purpose was to demonstrate to Manitobans that the NDP can be just as tough on “dangerous criminals” as any Tory government.

The bail-reform policies themselves were mostly window dressing that reinforced existing prosecutorial practices in bail court. The rhetoric behind them seemed to undermine what most criminologists would consider a more effective “roots of crime” approach to justice. The NDP announcement was widely panned in the legal community.

But this was no misstep by Kinew. It was part of a carefully crafted, Doer-like political strategy to appeal to Tory-minded voters.

It may be bad policy, but it’s smart politics.

Kinew has also been careful, like Doer was, not to alienate organized labour. He understands the official role unions play in the party and how critical it is to nurture that relationship. It’s one of the main reasons the Kinew government has made labour legislation a priority in its first legislative session.

Still, that has to be balanced with consistent public messaging about the need to make life “affordable” for Manitobans (tax cuts), to balance the books and to “get tough” on hardened criminals. It’s a balancing act Kinew hopes will earn him a second majority government.

Where does this leave the PC party? In a very bad spot. There isn’t much of a market for far-right politics in Manitoba, particularly in Winnipeg (the Tories learned that the hard way during last year’s provincial election). So when an NDP government occupies as large a swath on the political spectrum as the Kinew government is hoping to do, it leaves the Tories with few options.

The best they can do now (and they’re trying hard) is to push a narrative that the NDP is a “tax and spend” government that can’t be trusted with taxpayers’ money. It’s a tough sell when the party you’re criticizing has embraced every aspect of your tax cuts, matches you on justice and will probably balance the books more times than the Tories did during its seven and a half years in office (they did it only two times).

Even if the NDP doesn’t “fix” health care as promised and does no worse than the Tories on that file, they’re still ahead of the political game if they take the Gary Doer approach to politics. Doer didn’t fix health care, either. Nobody in Canada has.

It remains to be seen whether Kinew can match the deftness of Doer’s political acumen. But the two men have developed a close relationship in recent years. The current premier regularly consults with the former. It shows.

» Tom Brodbeck has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019. This column was originally published in the Free Press.