No inspiration here: Bold ideas were ignored

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2011 (5458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Are we making progress in solving the great problems facing Manitoba?

Is our health care-system better? We’ve hired more doctors and nurses, opened more beds and purchased more scanners. And yet, the lineups grow.

Are we safer? Overall crime is down, we’ve got more police on the street and in the air, and murders and gang-related incidents are up.

Are we wealthier? Fewer Manitobans officially fall below the poverty line, but the gap is growing between the very rich and the rest of society.

How are we to judge progress? Although it is not the only window of opportunity, in an ideal world an election would be a chance to study past records and debate new ideas. We could see what worked, what didn’t work and measure the taxpayer’s investment in making a better society against actual outcomes. Ah, were that only possible.

If this provincial election campaign — one of the most uninspiring in memory — has proven anything, it is that there is no room for an objective discussion about progress. Instead, voters are left to choose between the impossibly high expectations of opposition parties and the qualified defences by the governing party. Perhaps it’s election fatigue — with an election at all three levels of government in the past 12 months — but it’s difficult to figure out who is doing the best job or which party has the best ideas, in large part because we can’t get beyond the layers of rhetoric to objectively assess the work done to date.

Health care is probably the best case study in this phenomenon. No area of government has undergone as much change as health care. Radical changes in drug therapy, wellness medicine, diagnostic imaging, outpatient treatment and surgical techniques and technologies have allowed us to treat many more patients than ever before, with better outcomes. And yet, most voters believe the system is just as sick. Is that true, or is that just what we’ve been told at election time?

In between elections, opposition parties troll for the sick and grumpy, using every anecdote about delayed treatment as an indictment of the system. Incumbents respond by citing a record of increasing expenditures, even though more money does not necessarily produce a better system.

The ongoing debate about the NDP’s 1999 election pledge to “end hallway medicine” is a good case in point. Seizing on the 1990s image of vulnerable patients spending days at a time on gurneys in the hallways of emergency departments, the NDP promised to end the practice. More than a decade later, virtually no patients spend ‘days’ on gurneys in hallways. There are still patients in hallways, but only as a very short-term alternative. Premier Greg Selinger says the NDP were “95 per cent successful” in meeting the original pledge. Unfortunately, this achievement goes down officially as a failure because it fell short of the original, unrealistic election promise.

The “failure” of that and similar pledges has convinced most politicians in this province to ignore bold ideas. There have been brief flashes of innovation and creativity — the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce’s Bold Ideas campaign stands out — but many promising ideas never get debated because it is so hard to meet the grand expectations that come with them. There is no room for “95 per cent successful” in this political debate.

Consider the whole issue of infrastructure. We are spending more now on road rehabilitation than ever before, and yet the problem seems to be getting larger. Manitoba’s largest municipalities want to double provincial spending on infrastructure to nearly half a billion dollars annually.

However, those same municipalities do not support a one-per-cent increase in the provincial sales tax, an idea that was supported by the Manitoba Business Council, among others. They want to see the money come from existing revenues. Although they won’t say it, that would mean cuts to health care, justice and education. We know this because at a time when most governments in this country are in deficit, there is no way to double infrastructure spending without cuts in other areas. And that’s not progress.

We’re trapped between politicians who are afraid to raise taxes, special interests that worry little about the implications of their demands and voters who would like to have their cake (better roads) and eat it too (lower taxes). The result is that ideas like raising the sales tax to pay for infrastructure are never really debated. It’s a standoff where nobody has a loaded gun, nobody gets hurt and nothing gets decided.

Collectively, politicians, the lobbies and voters have to raise their games. We’re not getting anything accomplished in elections. Even when incumbents are defeated, the promises the new guys made to get elected will, as was the case with their predecessors, become the shortcomings that will eventually lead to their own demise. Opposition parties promise to solve problems they know may never get solved, and governing parties confuse treading water with progress.

We need a new political debate in this province and country. Unfortunately, we’re not going to get it in this election. Better luck next time.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca