Winnipeg Free Press

Next week, the Leg committee rooms will be a-hummin’ again as the teachers’ pension issue goes to public hearings. There are nearly 400 teachers in the queue waiting to speak, and I expect most will vent about the two-thirds cost of living pension increase they’re being offered. Not enough, they say, even though it would double their COLA hike this year and even though current and former teachers voted to accept it. The province also backfilled their pension liability by $1.5 billion, which looks none too good on the province’s debt line.

There was a letter to the editor recently complaining about the fact that the hearings are being held in the evening - an unsafe time for seniors to be out and about downtown and an inconvenient time to take the bus. That will be the kindest and most reasonable argument I expect to hear on Monday.

The retired teachers are the single most relentless and implacable lobby group I’ve encountered in my brief time at the legislature. The Taxpayers Federation could take a lesson. The teachers make large and frequent appearances in the House gallery, and every reporter who touches the pension issue gets a mini-avalanche of e-mails and calls and letters to the editor - some quite rude and strident.

I recall getting geeked up on the issue when I first arrived here, thinking Teachergate could be a great story, the injustice of our noble educators spending their retirement days in poverty. My interest waned after I started calling some retired teachers. In Florida.

Dang, what do the Tories need to do to keep a flak?

Melissa Ridgen, the Tories’ latest director of communications, resigned late last week. She came up to the press room to let us know yesterday in a most casual way. It’s not a huge shock. She was a controversial figure in these halls - intense, immature, relentlessly partisan and a bit impolitic. She was always calling the NDP “commies,” she wasn’t great on the nuances of policy wonkery and she had a habit of firing off snitty e-mails in the morning when she didn’t like a story. Plus, there was that DUI in Brandon. Many said Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen should have fired her right away.

But, in a building full of tight-lipped and tip-toey young party workers who have all sipped a little too much orange Kool-Aid, I had to admire her candor and pizzazz. She grew on me as the session wore on. And the Tories did seem to finally get a bit of momentum in the spring with a filibuster that forced the NDP to back down (at least for a couple months) on their legislative agenda. So I thought maybe she might settle in to the job, though it’s a role that really requires some long-term vision and some sophisticated strategizing. I’m not sure that’s the forte of any former reporter who can’t see three phone calls into the future let alone three years.

As someone smarter than me said, it’s also a slog being an opposition staffer, especially when Doer has such a grip on power and never does anything interesting enough to risk a mistake. It’s clearly been tough getting someone good to take the job and stay long enough to make a difference, just like it’s hard to assemble a roster of really great candidates. I’ve never seen a really good opposition flak long-term and up close. I’m not sure what one looks like.

Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen is finishing up an official trip to the Philippines today after travelling for a few days with Foreign Affairs people and Edda Pangilinan, the Philippine Honorary Consul General of Manitoba. They’re doing the typical trade mission stuff - going to a business fair, talking with companies interested in doing deals in Canada, meeting briefly with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA, for short), talking about immigration. It’s a lot like the trade mission Premier Gary Doer went on in February, one of a dozen trips he’s taken so far this year.

There’s three interesting things about McFadyen’s voyage.

First, the fact that Pangilinan was on the trip - she raised a stink in February when she wasn’t invited to go on Doer’s ride, and some (the Tories) viewed it as a faux pas.

Second, between this trip and some to First Nations up the east side of Lake Winnipeg, McFadyen is sure acting like a statesman-in-waiting, even though a new poll shows the wait could be looooong. I kind of wonder why folks in the Philippines would care about meeting an opposition leader from a small Canadian province - he can’t dole out business start-up grants, speed up professional accreditation processes or crack down on shady immigration agents. But he’s going anyway, like a hopeful one-day premier would.

I wonder if this trip isn’t more about a third thing - trying to woo the ethnic vote and make inroads into some of the most politically active communities in the province. After the election, the party hired former West End Biz boss Trudy Turner for a few months to help reach out to some of those groups before the next election, and McFadyen can trade on his trip for years when he’s schmoozing Filipino voters.

Meanwhile, Romy Magsino was awarded the Order of Manitoba last week. He was one of the NDP’s star candidates in the last election, former dean of education at the U of M and heavyweight in Winnipeg’s Filipino community.

The province released the polling it did before the budget today. It was pretty boring: Most people feel pretty good about the economy and the job the NDP are doing and health care is still the top spending priority. Shocker. But here’s a couple of interesting bits.

• Manitobans don’t give a crap about the environment or poor people. Only four per cent said going green or combating poverty were their top spending priority.
• Wait, that’s not true. The next question has 84% of Manitobans saying the province should give a higher priority to cleaning up lakes and rivers. People still didn’t care about hiking welfare rates or building more subsidized housing, though.
• When it comes to new taxes, nearly 60 per cent said they’d support a junk food tax. Wha? Hands off my Peanut M&Ms! I checked, and this isn’t actually happening, but it polled pretty well. Way better than raising the business tax or a small increase in gas taxes, two other options the NDP floated.
• 92% of people said promoting wind and geothermal would be a good way to boost the economy. I wonder if that’s a little nudge to Manitoba Hydro, which has been strangely slow to embrace either.
• There was a question about balancing the budget using savings from previous years - a test to see whether the current plan to balance the books over a four-year rolling average would play alright with the public. It didn’t do badly - 43 per cent said the province could balance over several years.

Public Utilities Board - one of those vague, governmenty-sounding phrases that makes readers quickly flip to the comics. I was one of those readers until I started actually skimming through PUB testimony a while back. As part of Manitoba Hydro’s latest rate application, Hydro’s senior officials got grilled for days and days this spring by some very smart lawyers who ask some refreshingly simple questions and got some pretty straight answers - way straighter than I get when I call over to Hydro, despite Bob Brennan’s affable charm. PUB stuff is a surprisingly interesting read, even laugh-out-loud funny in parts. And it offers this great window into the company that’s at the core of the Doer government’s policies and at the core of Manitoba’s economy. It’s a goldmine for anyone interested in Hydro. Which would be me and Ed Schreyer, basically.

And Pissing in the Tent, apparently. He beat me to the tidbit about Hydro maybe building a natural gas plant, which was part of a little exchange buried in thousands of pages of PUB testimony. I was kinda hoarding that nugget for a slow summer day. Fair play, PITT.

Here’s a little zinger tucked into Culture and Heritage Minister Eric Robinson’s speech yesterday about the residential schools apology - an insider reference for all you media junkies.
“Yesterday morning I heard a media personality here in Winnipeg question whether an apology was necessary. Excuse me, but it’s the survivors who decide what’s appropriate here and now, not those who believe they know what’s best, because it’s that kind of thinking that spawned the residential school system in the first place.”

Question Period has been pretty fun lately for those of us who revel in the theatrical absurdity of it all, but the Speaker seems to be getting pretty fed up with the heckling. There’s just three more days to go before the house rises as planned Thursday and everyone is tired and punchy from the marathon filibuster last week. Today was one of those days that was stop-and-start, where no one (not even Doer) could get more than half a sentence out before drowning in heckles. 

As he always does, Tory MLA Ron Schuler wins the award for the most relentless jibes, most aimed at the Premier. And they’re pretty personal, even though Schuler told a recent gathering of U of W students that he tries not to get personal in QP.

“Back to your tequila!” he shouted endlessly at Doer, a reference to the Premier’s moderately pointless trip to Mexico for a trade route summit last week. “Is that a little Pepto-Bismol on your tie?”

After one of those, we heard Speaker George Hickes mumble “Oh, man,” before standing up to demand order for the 48th time.

“Let’s have some respect for the dignity of this house and the guests that are with us today,” said Hickes as a big class of Hutterite kids looked on.

Good luck with that, Mr. Speaker.