Winnipeg Free Press

My mouthy NDP MP might want to take a break from the chaos of his federal ethics committee and do some quickie polling to make sure he’s still going to win his Winnipeg Centre seat by a bajillion votes. The federal Tories dropped another ten-percenter in my mailbox last night - this one from Saskatchewan MP Garry Breitkreuz.

Do the Tories know something we don’t know? Is Pat’s 7,000 vote margin of victory shrinking? I’ve heard Winnipeg South Centre Grit MP Anita Neville complain bitterly about the ten-percenters dumped into her riding, one the Tories could conceivably win. But Winnipeg Centre? Tell that to Stanley Knowles.

That’s the second Tory flyer I’ve had in two weeks. Curtis Brown wrote about the first one from a Vancouver Island MP late last month. This latest flyer was about drug addicts and how our playgrounds are littered with needles and drug dealers are prowling schoolyards looking to hook kids on the junk. It’s all a bit melodramatic, and the American-style over-sell trivializes a complex problem. Plus, it kind of gets up my nose that some MP from small-town Saskatchewan or idyllic Vancouver Island is trying to talk tough about drugs in a riding he’s probably never been to and that has genuine problems that deserve a little more thought than a scare-tactic photo of a dirty needle under the baby swings. 

Tory boss Hugh McFadyen un-shuffled his shadow cabinet today, basically putting it back to the way it was before the election.

Steinbach MLA Kelvin Goertzen returns to the justice beat after a short and unremarkable stint as health critic. That switcheroo just didn’t stick - we all kept going to health maven Myrna Driedger when we needed someone to beat up on Manitoba Health, and she asked most of the sick people questions during QP anyway, which raised some eyebrows. Driedger has a bevy of doctor and nurse sources, a good institutional memory and she almost always comes armed with documents she’s managed to pry out of the the WRHA’s access to information police. Plus she’s lots of fun, even though she sometimes goes off half-cocked.

The savvy and combative Goertzen is better suited to crime and punishment anyway. He was the architect of the party’s crime platform during the election - a focused week that was probably the party’s best. He was unusually low-key after the election - some started wondering if he had just given up entirely on provincial politics and was biding his time until Vic Toews stepped down. But Goertzen got a second wind during the filibuster, which he helped orchestrate and clearly had fun doing.

Couple other interesting moves - enviro critic Heather Stefanson keeps the green portfolio and takes over responsibility for all things Winnipeg from Bonnie Mitchelson, who is now the child welfare critic. Those could be front-page portfolios, if the Tories can get their act together. Plus, those are two decent Winnipeg MLAs who could use a little more face time if the Tories expect to make any inroads with suburban voters. Winnipeg issues get lost in the avalanche of endless questions about rural nursing homes and the Portage overpass. 

And, the ever-dapper Larry Maguire gets the added responsibility of kvetching about the inland port, a complicated and fascinating economic development issue that no one outside the political and business elite cares that much about. Yet.

Two little gripes that should be filed under: Why aren’t we doing that?

First, my colleague Bruce Owen and I just got snazzy flashdrive gadgets in the mail, courtesy of the city of Edmonton’s communication’s department - some pretty slick marketing. In Winnipeg, the communications department can’t even answer simple questions about road paving before deadline.

A couple months ago, the Canadian Association of Journalists had its annual conference in Edmonton and the city’s tourism army came out in force - there was a drink night with the mayor (who looks just like Sam) and major bumph. Now, Edmonton has sent us (and presumably all the other conference-goers) a USB thingy loaded with flak phone numbers (U of A, the city, the health authority) plus story ideas and a bunch of propaganda about Edmonton. “Edmonton is a city alive with boundless energy and opportunity…we want to share our story with you,” the letter reads. They even spelled my name right!

Most reporters will probably delete the info on the USB drive and use it to store the latest Cornie the Mennonite video, but it’s still a great idea. They really made the most out of having a bunch of reporters holed up in hotel board rooms. When the conference was held in Winnipeg a few years ago, we got pamphlets from Destination Winnipeg and that was about it.

Second, why does Saskatchewan have 11 Olympic athletes going to Beijing and we only have two? That’s pretty lame at a time when the city is investing millions in community clubs and recreation, a new indoor soccer complex is in the works, the Doer government has made phys ed mandatory for grades 11 and 12 and sports funding was a key promise of all the parties during last year’s provincial election.

This gripe doesn’t have much to do with the provincial government, except that it owns, funds or manages most of the buildings I am griping about. I have harboured this gripe for a while but a rainy night at the Fringe last week reminded me of it.

Why is every door downtown locked? Most buildings - the courthouse, the Legislature, the Manitoba Museum - have multiple entrances, sometimes one on every street. But only one door is open and it’s never the one you’re at.

Let’s start at the Law Courts. I can see the old courthouse from my window at the Leg but I can’t actually get into it. The court complex probably has six doors, but only one is open and it’s the one farthest from me - a big deal when it’s minus 40. Yeah, it’s only another block. And, yeah, I understand the need for security, but it’s still supremely annoying and very discouraging for pedestrians.

Next, let’s try to get into the confusing complex created by the Manitoba Museum and the Centennial concert hall during the Fringe, when bajillions of people are downtown, for once. On my way from Old Market Square to the Planetarium Fringe venue, I tried no fewer than three doors looking for a shortcut into the venue to get out of the crappy wind and rain. Every door on Main Street was locked, and I had to hoof it around the corner. Then, after the show was over, the tunnel to city hall was dark and locked, so we couldn’t use that to bypass the rain and get a little closer to our next show. Way to promote green pedestrian power, city fathers. Couldn’t you have left the doors open during the one time people are actually in The Exchange?

How about my own building, the Manitoba Legislature. There’s four doors (six, counting the basement entrances) and only one is really open to the public. If you are walking over from Osborne Village, you have to walk all the way around to Broadway to get in. At that point, you’d probably give up investigating the internal workings of a parliamentary democracy and just continue on to The Bay to look at shoes.

Another related gripe - surface parking lots. There’s a lot to hate about surface parking lots, but here’s one more thing: The waist-high wooden fences around all of them. Very often, I try to cut across a surface lot - the one just east of the Burt, for example - and I get stuck in the pen. Yeah, I can hike up my skirt and leap over or double back and walk around, but it’s just one more small thing that makes the downtown totally pedestrian unfriendly.

The Hack says I’m wrong about the finer points of the Jenkinson smoking decision. http://hacksandwonks.blogspot.com/

Here’s the highly-technical Court of Appeal decision.

http://www.canlii.org/en/mb/mbca/doc/2008/2008mbca28/2008mbca28.html

It says, essentially, that the province didn’t discriminate against Mr. Jenkinson because he could, theoretically, open up his own bar on a reserve. The Hack is probably right - the decision doesn’t explicitly say the province can’t enforce the ban on reserve, but that’s the practical application of the decision, and it was the undercurrent of the arguments made by First Nations interveners. The decision was a huge victory for the province and put the issue to rest, allowing the ban to stand off-reserve based on the principle that the province has no authority over First Nations.

In related news, Portage-Lisgar MP Brian Pallister called to say he made a rookie mistake Monday. He failed to catch the Court of Appeal decision that overturned Clearwater. Fair enough.

Why is the province’s democracy watchdog the least accountable agency in Manitoba? I know I sound like Liberal MLA Kevin Lamoureux, but the guy has a point. It’s a little Zimbabwe-esque over there at Elections Manitoba. I’m not even talking about high-level accountability stuff. I’m just talking about a decent website and staff that returns phone calls.

Here’s my beef: Elections Manitoba did a poll following last year’s election to gauge how their voting plans went. They do a poll like that after every election, I’m told. I’ve been asking for that poll for more than a year. In a faux-cheerful and slightly embarrassed way, I call about once a month asking when I can see the poll. I get the brush off, or my calls and e-mails go totally ignored. Par for the course at Elections Manitoba. Typically, half our calls on any given subject get returned. Except during the election when they had a temporary guy (Wayne?) who was pretty good to deal with.

Premier Gary Doer says all polls paid for by taxpayers ought to be public, and Manitoba’s Ombudsman made that policy official a few years ago after she ordered the city to release an OlyWest poll. The “polls are public” provision is even in the province’s new access to information legislation that’s slated to be passed this fall.

But, foiled again. Elections Manitoba isn’t covered by the FOI law.

Another beef: The Elections Manitoba website sucks. I’ve said it before, but every time I surf over there for a simple figure, I yell it again to whomever is in my office. I can’t ever find what I want and end up walking across the office to our bulletin board to peer at the yellowing Freep results page we print on election night. I know how crazy election night is in our newsroom, and I’d much rather get the definitive data from the pros who count the ballots. But their website is hard to navigate. Basic information (like, what percentage of the total vote did the NDP get?) is buried so deep you might as well get out your calculator and do the math yourself. There is virtually no historical information. Ottawa is so, so much better, thanks to a nice one-two combo of the Elections Canada site and the Parliament of Canada site, which has the voting history of every riding in every permutation. In Manitoba, we’ve got Wikipedia.

In a province that doesn’t exactly have a stellar election rep - vote rigging, pitiful turnout in remote areas, our own mini in-and-out scandal - you’d think Elections Manitoba could at least return a call or two. 

Outgoing Portage-Lisgar MP Brian Pallister issued a press release today slagging the nearby Long Plain First Nation for allowing smoking in its VLT lounge and conference centre, and chastising the province for not enforcing the province-wide smoking ban on reserves.

That’s interesting, I said to myself as I waited for the teachers’ pension hearings to begin. This will give me a chance to speak to Pallister, which I have never done before, which says something about him and me. I fired off calls to Pallister, Chief Dennis Meeches and the province for comment and then I realised Pallister had it exactly wrong.

The province can’t enforce the ban on First Nations. It doesn’t apply there and never has, and the courts said so. In a back-and-forth case that ended in March, Manitoba’s Court of Appeal reaffirmed the rights of First Nations to be exempt from provincial law. That was, you’ll recall, the case of Treherne bar owner Robert Jenkinson who challenged the law as unfair because it applied only to off-reserve bars like his. The court sided with the First Nations, not Mr. Jenkinson.

At best Pallister made a silly mistake. At worst, it’s a totally disingenuous bit of spin meant to make the province and Long Plain look bad, one that assumes that every reporter will be as dumb as I momentarily was. Pallister even quoted the orignal Clearwater decision that found in Jenkinson’s favour, a decision that was criticized by constitutional experts and firmly overturned on appeal.

Since it can’t legislate, the province is using the backdoor, refusing to renew VLT licenses unless First Nations bars go smoke-free, like Brokenhead’s South Beach Casino did. Long Plain’s license isn’t up yet, according to the province.

Back in 2006, Prentice was asked about a national ban that would apply fairly to everyone, including First Nations, and he said he didn’t support one. ”I don’t think it’s appropriate for the federal government to pass a piece of legislation that applies to all First Nations on this issue,” he told The Sun.