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Make Pallister A One-Term Premier
April 16, 2016 - 1:27pm
Unless the polls are wildly wrong, Pallister will certainly be elected Premier on Tuesday, the only question is how big his margin will be. We will also face a tough climate in 2020, when Pallister drops the PST to 7% and reminds voters that the NDP broke its promise and raised it, and voters will say, "what a breath of fresh air, a politician who keeps his promises."
So how do we overcome that to not only limit the damage he does to the province but to also show him the door next time?
Massive nonviolent resistance to the coming cuts will be needed, as will the creation of a clear set of grassroots-based alternative proposals to the neoliberal agenda both major Manitoba parties currently subscribe to.
Then, whoever takes over as MNDP leader from Selinger(and he will need to be dumped if he refuses to stand down from the leadership) will need to be pressed to make clean break from the way the party currently operates, so a radical reform movement within the MNDP will need to be organized immediately.
(self-delete. dupe post).
edit..note time change
After the Election: What Next for Social Justice?
Saturday, April 23
2 PM
The Hive University of Winnipeg Near Ellice Street Entrance.
Join us for a discussion on what the struggle for social justice will look like in a post-election Manitoba.
What do we do now? That's a tough question and probably can't be answered in one evening, but let's get started.
Representatives of Solidarity Winnipeg and the University of Winnipeg Students' Association (UWSA) will make short presentations before we start a facilitated discussion.
After the event is over feel free to join like-minded people for a fun evening out.
The 2016 Manitoba election and the fight against austerity
quote:
If the NDP wins in 2020 in such a climate, it's very unlikely to reverse much of what the Tories have done while in office (remember that after the NDP won office in 1999 they didn't reverse the privatization of MTS or repeal the Tories' balanced budget legislation, and that what the Tories are going to try to do this time will probably be much worse than what they did under Filmon in the 1990s).
quote:
4. Efforts to build active opposition to austerity will be starting from the very low level of activism that exists in Manitoba today. But they won't be starting from nothing: pockets of activism in union locals and on campuses, the ongoing indigenous resurgence and efforts that bring low-income people together in some Winnipeg neighbourhoods can all be seeds from which protest and resistance can grow....
The Legislature hasn't even sat and we already have a broken promise:
And so apparently it's going to take two terms for the province to become more competitive and to eliminate the deficit. That would put us to 2024. But wait! The Liberals promised to balance the budget in 2022, with the NDP timeline being 2020. The Liberal and NDP timelines came out during the election, the PCs afterwards.
So to reiterate: The PCs, being the ones that are supposedly the best financial stewards, release a plan that eliminates the deficit after everyone else. How the heck? How did Pallister escape scrutiny for being worse on the one thing his party is supposedly the best at? Where was the media in all of this? We heard so much outrage from Tom Broadbeck about how the NDP is ruining the province's finances, will he now direct his ire at the state of the province's books at the incumbent government? Can someone please help me figure this one out?
I presume that was a rhetorical question. It is what drives me crazy about the NDP's obsession with balancing the budget. In BC they have the best fiscal record of any governments over the last 50 years and the MSM always talks about how poorly they manage the provincial books. Its like they keep expecting to get a fair deal from the corporate media so they keep playing the neo-liberal game of "fiscal responsibility" and never dare to dream big and take big steps to change the economy.
Manitoba Tories ask for unanimous support on Trans-Pacific trade deal
Manitoba's Progressive Conservative government is backing a huge free trade deal among a dozen countries.
Manitoba's inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP could mean an increase of about $250 million a year in sales for the province's exporters, said Growth, Enterprise and Trade Minister Cliff Cullen in a news release, while exclusion would cut off access to important trade markets, putting Manitoba jobs at risk.
Besides Canada, the deal includes Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam.
Manitoba's pork producers could be big winners in the deal....
I'm guessing the NDP will "cautiously" support the TPP - as they did when in government? And Energy East? Etc.
..not sure where the ndp stands today on both those issues. wab kinew though was at catherine mckenna's town hall last night in wpg where most of the folks in the room stood up (over 300 attended) when asked who was against the pipeline. not to mention all the thoughtful and intelligent comments made from the floor re climate change.
Thanks, epaulo.
On March 31, during the election campaign, the NDP replied as follows to survey questions from the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition:
..yes and the ndp did sign on with the other premiers on prioitizing the pipelines..but that bunch is gone. i would certainly like to see this change now that the ndp needs to get back into the good graces of the people.
Guess who Pallister has accused of being in cahoots with the NDP:
You can tell the only reason this guy got elected in the first place is that people really hated Selinger. After promising to take longer to balance the budget than either the NDP or the Liberals, they have had a hard time defending their so-called savings.
Of course the NDP is also to blame for this mess. It's true that the April election disrupted the normal budgetary cycle, but that's no excuse. They cannot have been that tone deaf to think they had a realistic shot of winning the election, and if they were then the party has bigger problems. They are simply playing politics with the budget. If they were actually concerned about funding issues, they would have assembled a budget based on their consultations and then run on it, along with a few other things like raising the minimum wage. That would have accomplished 2 things. It would have put the money out there and given us more time to regroup and lobby against the next PC budgets. It would also have forced Pallister to decide whether he wanted to waste political capital on firing nurses, cutting child care spaces, not building the Lorette multiplex, not providing a 24-7 safe space for teenage girls in Winnipeg's West End, freezing the minimum wage, etc.
And what I have seen from Flor Marcelino does not instill a great deal of confidence in this choice. I know she's an interim leader, but why pick someone who never held a major portfolio and never had to answer questions in the Ledge? Aside from getting in trouble with Health Canada, she has essentially been MIA. Wab Kinew, Nahanni Fontaine, and James Allum have been far more effective in their critiques of the Pallister government. Even Jim Malloway, of all people, has been more vocal and effective, particularly for challenging the MTS sale, and when you're less effective than Jim Malloway, that says something.
Ugh. And we have to put up with this for 4 more years.
Pallister claims illness prevented attending a vigil for the Orlando massacre victims:
Pallister does something for poverty reduction:
So the Legislature resumes sitting on October 3, and to suggest that the NDP will have a difficult time is an understatement. To start, Pallister is currently the most popular Premier in Canada after Brad Wall. Then there's the cancelling of the move of Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries to downtown (although in fairness, while more people working downtown is a plus, the full benefits won't be realized if the staff drive to their suburban homes at 5 PM every week) the report on Manitoba Hydro, along with rate hikes and job losses, and a rate hike proposed for MPI. Funny, I thought the PCs were all about keeping money in people's pockets, unfortunately they have done a masterful job of spinning everything around to make it the NDP's fault. Meanwhile, the railway to Churchill is under threat, along with the entire city of The Pas with the difficulties around the Tolko mill, and I'm not aware of the PCs comitting to projects like moving ACC to the North Hill in Brandon or the Merchant's Corner on Selkirk. All with their fear-mongering about the deficit being much bigger than anyone ever anticipated. And who's there to hold Pallister to account? Both the NDP and the Liberals are divided over leadership issues, and the Greens aren't even represented in the Ledge.
Ugh. Just...
You can't spell 'Conservative' without 'Cons'
It's amazing to me how people continue to elect con artists and most of the best ring toss carnies happen to be Conservative.
It's not the politicians that are fucked,it's the people who continue to vote for these shysters.
OH MY GOD! THE LATEST BUDGET FIGURES REVEAL THE DEPTH OF THE CURRENT CRISIS!
Oh, you mean the current budgeting situation hasn't caused the world to come to an end?
'It's an attack on workers': NDP pans PC labour bill
A new government bill designed to change the rules about how workers form unions passed its second reading this week. While Tories say it will make the process more democratic, opponents argue it's a concealed attempt to throw obstacles in the path of organized labour.
Bill 7, the Labour Relations Amendment Act, would do away with the long-standing card check system in Manitoba, which allowed unions to form automatically if a super-majority -- 65 per cent -- of workers sign union cards.
Instead, the new rules would require all potential unions to hold a secret ballot vote, which supporters say will protect workers from coercion.
"I think our workers in Manitoba deserve to have the protection it offers, from coercion, from intimidation, from follow-up bullying as a consequence of whether they voted one way or another," said Premier Brian Pallister.
"I think the workers own the right to that ballot, and they own the right to decide whether they publicly disclose how they voted or not," he said.
Critics of the bill point to research that shows successful attempts to unionize drop when the card check system is eliminated, but Pallister said if it happens here, it might be a good thing.
quote:
Attack on labour, NDP says
Opponents of the bill say it opens workers up to intimidation, instead of the other way around.
"The whole point of this bill is it will make it more difficult for workers to organize into a union," said NDP MLA Tom Lindsey. "That in itself is an attack on organized labour."
http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2017/01/20/manitoba-premier-says-indige...
Just because he's Premier of Manitoba doesn't mean he actually has to live there
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/inside-the-costa-rican-retreat-of-man...