Pallister foolish for going rogue

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2017 (2374 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was one of the strangest moments for Premier Brian Pallister.

It was Wednesday Sept. 13, and the topic was pre-budget consultations. At a news conference flanked by Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen and Finance Minister Cameron Friesen, Pallister announced his government was considering an annual premium to help pay for the escalating costs of health care.

It was odd for several reasons.

First, Pallister had never given anyone any indication he was considering a new tax. The premier had been steadfast the former NDP government left him a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and he was going to eliminate the deficit through expenditure control.

Second, the idea came from Pallister — not his ministers or via a strategic leak of some sort.

How weird was it to hear Pallister talk openly about the possibility of raising taxes? Imagine U.S. President Donald Trump suddenly advocating increased immigration or stricter gun control. It was that weird.

It was extremely risky to use the premier, one of Manitoba’s most vehement tax opponents, as the poster boy for this idea. Now, thanks to a Free Press-Probe Research poll, we can see just how risky.

More than 70 per cent of respondents are opposed to the idea of a health-care tax; a remarkable 53 per cent are strongly opposed.

The deeper you go into the poll numbers, the worse things look for the Tories.

Among voters 35 to 54, a key voting demographic, a whopping 76 per cent are opposed, with 60 per cent strongly opposed. Even among respondents that self-identify as Progressive Conservative voters, 63 per cent are opposed, with 43 per cent strongly opposed.

(As an aside, the Probe poll should be a warning to the Pallister government to stop using online surveys to gauge public opinion. Preliminary results from the online poll launched by the Tories in September showed a simple majority in favour of health premiums. Better luck next time.)

The cherry on the cake for Pallister is the second question Probe asked about the health-care premium.

Namely, whether respondents believe introducing a premium would be tantamount to a broken promise. More than half of all respondents would view a health premium as a broken promise; only 31 per cent accept Pallister’s claim that the premium is necessary to deal with unanticipated fiscal realities.

It is widely held Pallister promised in 2016 not to raise taxes if he won the election. In fact, what Pallister promised was never to raise any major taxes — income, sales or business — without allowing Manitobans to vote in a referendum. He did not, however, issue a blanket pledge never to raise any tax, under any circumstance.

That was a clever ploy for him. However, it didn’t stop him from lashing out at other levels of government when they even hinted at a tax increase. He did this when Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman first raised the issue of development levies. He has also been among the shrillest critics of the federal Liberal government’s plan to tighten tax loopholes for small business.

And he has certainly made tax reduction a central feature of his once-we-get-the-deficit-under-control musings. Pallister believes strongly that balancing the provincial budget is not the end goal of his government; eliminating the deficit and returning to a surplus, he has said, is the means by which he can deliver tax cuts.

It is tough to believe someone within earshot of the premier wouldn’t have advised him to let someone else float the idea, or just leak it to the media and watch the debate unfold. Perhaps someone did tell him to take a more indirect route, and he ignored them. The inability to accept the best advice of his closest advisers is fast becoming one of the hallmarks of the Pallister administration.

Pallister could not absolve himself of all responsibility for an idea such as this. But he could have remained at arm’s length, which would have allowed him to be the one to kill it at some point in the future.

The timing of this announcement is another issue that should be explored by Tory strategists.

Pallister’s health premium flyer took place on the Wednesday before the NDP leadership convention. It was a volatile time for the opposition New Democrats, as the presumptive front-runner and eventual winner, Wab Kinew, was being ravaged by allegations he had been involved in a domestic assault 14 years ago.

The health premium announcement did not spare Kinew. The day after Pallister mused about health premiums, the woman at the centre of the allegations spoke to The Canadian Press for the first time. For the next two weeks, Kinew faced a surge of new allegations.

However, Pallister’s announcement most certainly competed for the public’s attention. Even political neophytes know that when your enemies are suffering, you don’t do or say anything that might draw the public’s attention. Unveiling the idea of a health premium in the midst of Kinew’s public roasting is an amateurish strategic mistake.

The way in which Pallister raised this issue, and when, are reminders that one of the biggest concerns raised by Tories after Pallister became leader was his potential to be his own worst enemy.

You can bet Pallister will kill the idea of a health premium in the coming weeks. Quite frankly, hardly anyone thought he was serious about levying a new health tax.

Unfortunately for Tories, the damage to both himself and his government may already be done.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca