It would be foolish to discount Pallister

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This article was published 08/02/2020 (2089 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Nobody likes to be disliked, but I learned a long time ago that if you want to be liked and the price is not doing the right thing, then you made the wrong decision.”

— Premier Brian Pallister

“(Brian Pallister) doesn’t fit the mould a lot of people see in their leaders. He likes to have his own principles in how he governs himself and he isn’t going to change them, no matter what people think he should do.”

— Philip Houde, Brian Pallister’s former chief of staff

 

Somewhere around a dinner table this weekend, Brian Pallister is spending some time with his wife Esther and their family. Perhaps he’s here in frigid Manitoba warming his toes around the family hearth and eyeing Friday’s dropping mercury with ire like the rest of us. The more likely scenario is that he has left the country for his property in the Tamarindo area of Costa Rica for a bit of a family vacation in the sun.

The truth is, the public is not privy to his whereabouts. Where he is decidedly not, however, is in Washington, D.C., for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association like a few of his peers.

A spokeswoman for Pallister confirmed to the Winnipeg Free Press on Thursday that the Manitoba premier would not be hobnobbing with the likes of Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe, Alberta’s Jason Kenney, Ontario’s Doug Ford, Quebec’s Francois Legault and New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs in Washington this weekend for the three-day meeting that began Friday.

From our vantage point, he has a right to his vacation time. That said, his absence at this glorified international photo-op on trade has predictably drawn the ire of NDP finance critic Mark Wasyliw, who said the premier should have worked his holiday schedule around such an event.

“Everybody is entitled to a vacation, but I think as premier you have a duty to Manitobans to promote our exports, especially with our largest trading partner,” Wasyliw said. “We need to grow our economy in Manitoba to pay for health care, for the services Manitobans rely on, and this is the government being asleep at the switch.”

It’s an odd criticism, really, considering that the first three years of the Pallister government were defined by political attempts to remove trade barriers for Manitoba goods, both internationally and inter-provincially.

That aside, it’s worth asking the question whether Brian Pallister feels that being photographed with Doug Ford, Jason Kenney and Scott Moe — blue Tories all — is good for him politically. Ford, Moe and Kenney governments have been getting a significant amount of negative press over the past year.

Not only are Kenney and Moe sabre rattling about Western separatism to a largely uninterested rest of Canada, Kenney’s approach has been decidedly Trump-esque.

Consider this comment by University of Lethbridge political sociologist Trevor Harrison in the Edmonton Journal late last month:

“Riding a wave of populist hate and anger, the United Conservative Party of Jason Kenney has, since the spring 2019 election, been bending and changing the rules of normal political practice. Kenney does not emulate Trump’s style, of course. He is a more practised speaker, less given to off-the-cuff rants, but no less calculating in his aims.

“Ultimately, the UCP’s actions are designed for one purpose: to politically threaten, financially cripple and bring to heel any individual or group that dare stand against it. In very Trumpian fashion, the UCP is subtly — or not so subtly — trying to bring about a new normal of authoritarian rule. Albertans of all political persuasions should be concerned.”

Ford, who has never been shy of courting controversial statements and actions, decided to wade into American politics on Friday while in Washington, according to a CTV news story, taking shots at United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders, “while expressing his desire to see the re-election of President Donald Trump.”

In a Canada where an Abacus Data survey last year found that nearly eight in 10 Canadians would prefer to see a Democrat — any Democrat — in the White House than sit through another term of President Trump, Ford’s comments would seem to hit a discordant note.

Whatever the NDP or Liberals in Manitoba may say about the Manitoba premier’s style of politics and his tendency to be overly secretive regarding his vacation time in Costa Rica with his family, they would have a hard time pinning any of these far-right statements and actions on Pallister. The Kenneys and Fords of this country are not Pallister’s kind of people and will serve him no political good. Perhaps that is why we hear essentially nothing these days about the New West Partnership trade agreement with Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. It’s almost as if, in the wake of Wexit, the partnership is on hold, or sidetracked. It’s certainly not politically expedient.

It was Brian Pallister, too, who took the road less travelled by Canada’s conservatives following the re-election of Justin Trudeau to a minority government.

“We’re going to make the country work; we work together on it, we make a commitment to it. It’s a relationship,” Pallister said at the time. “My wife and I have been together for 35 years, and we don’t get stronger as a couple by threatening to leave every week.”

This statesman-like comment was followed up by a charm offensive in November where he tempered previously turbulent waters between his government and that of Trudeau’s Liberals during a trip to Ottawa. But to what end? We’ve been asking ourselves why Mr. Pallister decided to change his tone with Ottawa so abruptly.

A few months ago, another Abacus Data poll suggested that Manitoba’s sometimes testy premier would have a “decent shot at leadership” of the federal Tories, should he decide to seek the position — even as he counted himself out of the running. But his decision not to seek the leadership of the national party came long before many of the apparent front-runners had bowed out — heavyweights like Jean Charest, Rona Ambrose, Brad Wall and Pierre Polievre.

The list of currently approved candidates is not lengthy anymore — and not especially inspiring. Former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay is the strongest among them, and yet since throwing his hat into the ring, MacKay has stumbled more than once over his own gaffes and mistakes. As National Post columnist John Ivison wrote this week, MacKay’s missteps have given new life to the “anyone-but-MacKay” campaign that seems to be growing within the party rank and file.

After Erin O’Toole, the MP for Durham, a social conservative — who will have a difficult time making any breakthroughs in Ontario and Quebec — all that’s left is a cavalcade of non-starters and wannabes who are little-known outside of their own constituencies.

It would be foolish to discount a politician such as Brian Pallister, who once ran for the leadership of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1998, and who at one point had considered running for the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada upon the merger of the Canadian Alliance and old PCs.

Pallister is a man of great ambition who has fiercely guarded his privacy — his own and that of his family’s — over the years. If he was ever going to consider a run for national leadership, he has never been in a better position to make the leap. Though his character is hardly warm and fuzzy, he has led the Manitoba Tories through two successful election campaigns and secured two strong majorities in the process.

He has said and done all the right things since his re-election to be given serious consideration on a national platform as a successful, thoughtful elder statesman. We could be cynical and suggest this is a highly calculated move — which of course, it is. But it’s difficult to argue with success. And Peter MacKay would find him a formidable opponent in any leadership race.

So we’re left to wonder if Pallister’s time with family, at this precise time in the national political discourse, has more to do with making a decision as a family than taking a break from the snow and the cold.

Conversations ‘round the dinner table — stranger things have happened.

» Matt Goerzen, editor