Hot-headed premier chips away at government’s claims of accountability

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This article was published 30/01/2021 (2050 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“In a pandemic, it becomes a crisis of confidence, because people are saying, ‘Why should I be following these rules when the people at the top don’t?’”

— Manitoba Liberal Party Leader Dougald Lamont

 

Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister has increasingly acted like a man under siege over the past few months.

No doubt the office of premier is a difficult and stressful one — especially during a pandemic — but that fact can’t explain away what happened Thursday when the premier blew up at a question from a Winnipeg Free Press reporter during a televised news conference.

It came to light this week that the chairman of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority board of directors, Wayne McWhirter, travelled to Arizona earlier this month.

When reached by media, McWhirter confirmed he was in Arizona, but refused to say why he had travelled there. This at a time when the provincial government has demanded of Manitobans to do not travel outside the province for any reason.

Opposition calls for McWhirter to either be removed from the post or for him to step down were met with a refusal from government to do so. The best that Pallister could come up with on Thursday is to express his disappointment in the chairman, and defend his government’s position not to remove him, saying that McWhirter “isn’t a political staffer” and shouldn’t be subject to the same political and bureaucratic yardstick.

“This is a person who, apart from a per diem, is one of the over 1,000 people that have volunteered to serve on a board in our province,” Pallister said. “And, so, I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying that the person involved is not a paid staffer of the government like 1,000 other people. They serve as a volunteer.”

It’s not the first time this month that someone with Tory links — McWhirter was appointed by the Pallister government — has found themselves in media crosshairs.

Progressive Conservative MLA James Teitsma made headlines just after the holidays when it was learned he and his family had gone on a driving trip to British Columbia during Christmas.

So, too, did the province’s chief bureaucrat, David McLaughlin, who was allowed to work from his Ottawa home during the last two weeks of December, while a senior PC political staffer was permitted to travel to eastern Canada as well.

Though Teitsma was not initially punished, a spokesperson for Pallister’s office told Winnipeg media that he was removed from one of the committee positions he held previously — though he has never publicly apologized for his actions and remains on the powerful Treasury Board. McLaughlin has seemingly escaped discipline altogether.

These revelations have not gone over well within the public sphere. Routinely on COVID-19 related stories on the Sun website that deal with the provincial restrictions in place, readers are criticizing the Pallister government over its two-tiered approach to government policy — one rule for ordinary citizens and quite another for well-connected government elites.

So when Free Press reporter Larry Kusch doubled down on the question about McWhirter and put it to the premier whether this was a question “of folks in high places being allowed to travel with impunity” if they have the right political connections, Pallister lost his cool and lashed out at the reporter.

Mr. Pallister did the same to another Free Press reporter the week before — instead of answering the question posed about Teitsma’s poor decision to travel, blaming that paper for not reporting fairly on the premier’s baseless assertions of wrongdoing by members of the Opposition.

It would seem that this is Mr. Pallister’s tell — lash out when the political waters get a little heated, or when you don’t want to talk about a particular subject.

And it appears to be worsening.

It’s fair to say that not every question posed to a sitting premier will be a perfectly fair one, and not every line of questioning will be reasonable when it comes from the media. We are all human after all, and it’s easy to forget that the person on the other side of the microphone is human too, with the same human failings.

But the premier’s increasingly indignant and resentful demeanour to members of the media is doing little good for Progressive Conservative party fortunes. It does not serve the public interest to be at constant war with those tasked with questioning government actions. It only further hurts this government’s claim to accountability and transparency.

For that to happen in the midst of a deadly pandemic is doubly troubling, as it adds more confusion to an already bad situation.

Just like justice has to be seen to be done, so too does a government have to be seen to follow its own rules and restrictions, or risk the wrath of the public when hypocrisy is exposed.