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2016 Manitoba Election - a general thread?
April 3, 2016 - 1:31pm
There are plenty of threads on specific issues, but none on the election in general. Why is that?
We have:
Manitoba Liberals resign
Wab Kinew will help the NDP
Manitoba Polls
Time for a New NDP Leader?
By election thread
etc.
But no thread about the election generally. hmm ...
Darrell Rankin of the Manitoba CP has a piece in the Communist paper about the Manitoba election. In his view there are 3 neo-liberal parties running, and a mostly neo-liberal Green party that only targets certain sectors (auto, oil and gas) of big business.
One thing that Rankin pointed out ... was that the child welfare system in Manitoba is truly broken. Or works like a charm, depending on how you look at it. It is a child apprehension machine, says the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC), ... so much so that ..
That's quite a dubious distinction. See "the highest child apprehension rate in the world".
Rankin: a pox on all your neo-liberal houses.
The Reds are running half a dozen or so candidates. Well, at least they're out there. The Greens are much better organized. From here it looks like the milquetoast labour movement isn't going to be conducting any independent labour organizing or action.
Is a change of government likely? We will know on the 19th.
Manitoba Conservatives open the door to privatization
Social service schemes announced this week by the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives to encourage private child care and introduce Social Impact Bonds soften the ground towards privatization. The assumption is that the private sector knows best how to fund and deliver public services. This is false – publicly delivered services are more efficient, accountable and in the long-term public interest.
In “Tories say they would boost private daycare,” Conservative family services critic and MLA Ian Wishart says, “We’d like to leave the money with the parents and perhaps provide more opportunities for licensed privates” (Winnipeg Free Press, June 5, 2015). Manitoba has 12,000 children on the wait list for child-care spaces. In order to create enough spaces to meet the demand, capital grants are needed to build or expand centres and operating grants are needed to make them affordable to parents. New or expanded child-care centres need qualified staff trained at publicly funded institutions. Investments of this magnitude are not going to come from the private sector.....
I am shaking in my boots with the thought of a Conservative government in Manitoba. Is the best we can wish for a Pallister minority? I feel a Michael Harris in Ontario emotional redux coming on. I am so pissed off that those breakaway NDP MLAs took their fight/dirty laundry to the press. What greater good did that serve? Did they want to hand an election victory to Pallister? Sometimes I wonder about these stupid political shenanigans where the good of the citizens is lost is some stupid fight for power. I have never bought into 'change in government = opportunity to improve and renew" way of thinking that some political insiders ascribe to. In the meantime, while the NDP sorts itself out, the Manitoba public will have to endure all sorts of privatization and religious zealotry (abstinence only health eduation among other things) for the next 4 years.
The only chance the MNDP has is to run a passionate, truth-telling "fire up the base" campaign.
But they're still led by the pro-ossification wing of the party, so that won't happen.
A Pallister minority is the best that can be hoped for (the Liberals would likely be glad to support it), but Selinger would use that as an argument for NOT standing down, so even that would almost certainly be followed by an early election in which a PC majority would be a sure thing.
The only Dipper MLA's who can survive will be those who get out their and bring the fire themselves. Blandness means certain defeat this year.
It's not Pallister becoming Premier that scares me so much. The results from Saskatchewan this week are still fresh in my mind. We have watched the BC NDP blow at least 3 elections that were theirs to win. The Ontario NDP has, for nearly 20 years, been burned by the "vote-for-us-because-the-PCs-are-scary-and-the-NDP-are-sellouts" tactics used by the Liberals without being able to come up with an effective response. I'm worried that the Manitoba NDP will become captive to the same forces in other provinces, and will be just as ineffective, and that the PCs will be able to get away with murder in this province.
I'm also disappointed with the "left" in Manitoba, if there is any. So much focus is on keeping the NDP elected in perpetuity. While it matters who sits on the government side, your friends will not always hold the levers of power, so it's important to keep your people organized and engaged at all times. In other words, we're not trying to stop Pallister being elected because we fear he'll sell Manitoba Hydro, we create the political climate where he wouldn't even dare. Unfortunately, the right-wing is much better at this game than the left. That's the reason Rachel Notley didn't touch the royalty rate structure in Alberta. (And hats off to AFL President Gil Gowan for calling her out on that.)
An Insignt Manitoba poll released on April 4th showed a decline in Liberal support in Winnipeg of 3% with the NDP and PCs gaining 3% each. Since the poll was done from March 26 to April 3 before many of the above problems were known to the public, future polls are likely to show a further decline.
i therefore think that the NDP is likely to finish a solid second well behind the PCs, but well ahead of the sinking, chaotic Liberfals, who had two candidates and chief of staff resign at the beginning of March, then had 4 candidates turned down by Elections Manitoba because they did not fill in their papers properly and another one because she violated Manitoba law by being involved in voter enumeration, followed by the removal of another candidate for assaulting his wife. Since the last six candidates left after the final day for candidate registration, the Liberals are down six candidates. Because all of this occurred towards the end of the polling period, the full effect on the Liberals electoral chances is not far frin fully reflected in the Winnipeg poll.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-election-liberal-support...
It's kind of hard to do that, though, when you've been in office for 17 years. Even if the NDP were to go full Sanders/Corbyn and start promising sweeping reforms, it would raise obvious questions about why this sudden reversal of policy, why now, and are they really serious?
A poll released April 7th has confirmed the decline in Liberal support, but most of it has gone to the Cons.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/grenier-manitoba-mainstreet-1.352...
Manitobans are split on whethre the PST should be lowered.
http://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/manitobans-deeply-divided-on-pst-poll-1.2853248
Free Press web poll currently reporting that Selinger won the leader's debate.
The most striking thing about the post-debate poll numbers is the collapse of the Liberals to only 5% - more likely to be mostly due to their candidate resignations as well as disqualifications by Elections Manitoba for electoral law violations and other unforced errors than the debate itself, although the debate definitely did not help.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/televised-debate-pallister-beddom...
That poll has the Liberals at 4% in Winnipeg. They aren't going to win any seats.
So the Manitoba Liberals are going the way of the Saskatchewan Liberals - fighting with the Greens for third place. Brutal.
Well, maybe the Greens will pick up a seat or two.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/provincial-election/bokhari-say...
Rana continues to be a total disaster. I have no idea what the MB Liberals were thinking or whether they even had anything for her to work with. The "We don't want good jobs - we want innovative and creative jobs" also fell with a thud.
Today's great idea was to reduce Cabinet to nine positions (50% cut to departments/portfolios). Mind you, Pallister will also cut 6 Cabinet positions.
I love how the media reports this - makes it sound like less elected MLAs on the gravy train without ever examining the implications of the freaking departments those Cabinet members are responsible for. Even if it's a case of merging responsibilities under one new head, it still means significant layoffs of public service jobs and a diminishment in the importance of the portfolio cut. Case in point, Harper absorbed CIDA under Foreign Affairs and it's size, mandate and impact are all seriously diminished.
I am very angry right now with the NDP because it has failed to acknowledge that its leader raising an unpopular sales tax after promising not to was going to alienate large swaths of the population. This has enabled a Harper crony to be a main contender after Winnipeg resoundingly voted against Harper 6 months ago. The worst part is, no matter how bad Pallister is, when he lowers the PST to 7% in 2020, he will remind people that the NDP raised it in the first place, and the people will say, "a politician who keeps his promises, what a breath of fresh air" and they will likely re-elect him. The great irony is that the NDP has been successful at hitting the PCs over the head over their broken promise not to sell MTS, but for some reason, we haven't heard about MTS in this election. I wonder why?
But the PST issue is only a symptom. Even when I first joined the NDP when living in Brandon, so many establishment figures told us little people that we had to go along despite our "disagreements," and yet never took our concerns seriously. Well, people get tired of that nonsense and move on after a while. To illustrate that point, I personally know of at least one NDP candidate from 1988 who is now an active supporter of the Greens, and has been for some time. But hey, at least the architects of this campaign don't have to worry, because they'll be fine with their pensions and perks, unlike the rest of us who will have to suffer because of the horrible decisions Pallister is about to make in the likely event that he wins.
May the names of Gary Doer, Greg Selinger, and the names of all others who enabled this disaster never be spoken again in polite NDP company!
I've been reading that those disappointed in the Libs are casting their votes with the Cons or else not voting. I fear we will be experiencing the same hell as I had the misfortune to experience in Ontario with two terms of f*cking Mike Harris and his colleagues who went on to have significant portfolios under Harper's federal Cons.
Looks like our Pal is finally coming under some scrutiny
Rana can't remember if she filed her taxes. Brian can't remember his vacations. Is there something in the water at the Manitoba legislature?
You would think that those 'stop the gravy train' voters who are all for cutting back public service jobs would have a hard time stomaching Pallister's self-imposed 2.5 months a year worth of paid vacation. I am so sick and tired of hearing how he deserves his entitlements because he is such a successful businessman. Does it not concern any of these "not another dime of my hard earned tax dollars" crowd that Pallister is on a tax payer's paid salary as an MLA and Leader of the Opposition? And his invasion of family privacy excuse doesn't wash - he didn't have to bring spending time with family as an excuse. We all love vay-cay time with family or not. That's not the issue.
The NDP didn't lose anything last weekend. It's not as though Mulcair is the only possible leader who an ever win seats in Quebec(Alexandre Boulerice could win a lot more), and it's not possible for a leader who lost more half of his party's seats to to lead that same party to a comeback next time. Mulcair was beaten because he refused to listen and refused to change. What possible good would it have done for the NDP to run the exact same campaign in 2020(or. worse yet, run one even further to the right, with even more control-freakery and even more removal of good candidates just for committing truth on international issues) Mulcair had nothing more to offer. He was never going to be popular again.
And the NDP can use the values of the Leap to build a new base of support among the environmentally conscious(and among those seeking a sustainable full-employment economy). Alberta doesn't have to have any more pipelines to get its oil to market.
What really gets me is he said something about being around "politicizing" the flood. Excuse me? Mr. Pallister, your job as a politician is to be there for the people of your province when they need you, and had you actually shown up, this would have been a non-issue and we wouldn't be having this conversation. I can even understand if you were away when a disaster hit and you had difficulty making it back, but why lie to us about where you were?
I've also noticed that these right-wing politicians are good at giving general platitudes about what they plan to do by talking about "consutling" and the details don't come out until after the election. Unfortunately for the NDP, it was Beddome who landed the most effective blows on Pallistar, particularly on points the NDP should have been getting.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we set out to deceive
http://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/pallister-confirms-costa-rica-travel-records-apologizes-for-getting-dates-wrong-1.2860768
http://news.co.cr/canadian-politician-under-fire-at-home-for-frequent-co...
I wonder if Pallister's name appears in the Panama Papers
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/brian-pallister-costa-rica-democr...
While I agree with the first part of the second paragraph, to be fair to Rachel Notley it's not just a question of getting more oil (or bitumen) to market but of getting a better price for it. Although the argument that more oil royalties will pay for more sustainable infrastructure is bogus because it will take years to get a pipeline built and climate change won't wait. I suspect that a significant number of Quebec delegates also voted for a leadership review, and it's quite possible that another Leader could do better in Quebec (hint: another Leader already has).
http://www.mainstreetresearch.ca/manitobas-choice/
One might have thought that the collapse of the Liberals would benefit the NDP, especially with such a right winger as Pallister leading the Cons. But the Liberal defections according to this poll are mostly toward the Conservatives. It seems that the antipathy to Selinger is responsible.
The Cons lead the NDP by the same 2 to 1 ratio by which the NDP lost by in Saskatchewan. We can expect similar results.
In '11 the NDP led by 3%. If they are behind by 29 that, on a straight swing, imperils every NDP seat where the margin was less than 32%. In the last election there were only 10 of those (one of which may go Green).