There are a lot of challenges facing Canada and the world these days and there are many days where you just want to get away from the news. In fact, for many people, that is probably a very healthy response where a break from the daily onslaught of news is the right thing to do. That is a little more challenging for those in elected life where the job is to maintain an up to date understanding of the things that impact our province and country. And these days in particular, we need serious leaders who are not only informed of events but are weighing the response and its impact.
Unfortunately, what we have seen from the Manitoba NDP government and its leader, Wab Kinew, is a government that seems to be more interested in producing funny social media content then serious responses to things impacting Manitoba. The most recent example came this past weekend when trade negotiations between the United States and Canada were suddenly called off by the Trump administration. The apparent reason was advertising that the Ontario government was doing in the United States calling out the harm of tariffs and how it differed from the policy of past Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan.
One thing that most Canadians agree on is that the tariffs being applied by the United States are unfair, unlawful and ultimately harmful to both our countries. Whether the advertisement was the real reason for the end of negotiations towards a new deal is debatable as are the merits of the strategy. But for Manitobans, what may be most surprising is that the instinct of our NDP Premier wasn’t to call local business leaders to assess the impact of the latest turn in negotiations or to connect with other Premiers across the country. His first instinct was to make a video, dressed up to look like a 1980’s TV address, to commend Doug Ford for running the ad. At a time of great uncertainty for Manitoba and Canada, it doesn’t seem like the first actions of a serious Premier at such a moment should be to produce silly content for Instagram.
Contrast this with the actions of other Premiers, such as Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has been spending significant time connecting with world leaders around the globe to drum up new markets for the products that his province exports in an effort to become less reliant on the United States market. When asked in the Legislature what efforts in Manitoba are being made to find other markets, NDP Ministers responsible for the file make jokes and laugh as though hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars are not at stake for Manitobans.
And when there is an opportunity, through legislation, for the NDP to demonstrate to Manitobans that they are serious about meeting the most pressing issues for our province, what we get from the NDP are solutions in search of a problem. The most recent example is the distraction launched by Premier Kinew in introducing, with much dramatic effect, a bill that will require any future Manitoba legislation that includes in it a notwithstanding clause provision (to exempt it from Charter challenge), be referred to a Manitoba court for opinion. When pressed by the media to give a single example of when the notwithstanding clause had ever before been used in Manitoba, the Premier could not name one. When asked what power the court had to overturn any legislation that might be referred to it in such a case, the Premier said the court is powerless. So in short, this legislation that the Premier feels is one of the most pressing issues before Manitobans is solving a problem that has never existed using legislation that has no power.
These are very serious times for our province and our country. Manitoba’s NDP government needs to start taking the issues as seriously as they take their social media accounts.
