Manitoba’s September 10 provincial election pits Premier Brian Pallister (PCs, 35% in latest polls) against Wab Kinew (NDP, down from 30%), whose 2016 wage garnishment for a $606 fine and deputy Nahanni Fontaine’s unpaid court order highlight accountability gaps. Bill 240’s proposed criminal disclosures exclude such fines, while media like CBC amplified flawed Converso poll data before correcting, leaving voters misled. Pallister’s attacks on Kinew—privilege claims, Leap Manifesto opposition, and carbon tax hypocrisy—mask deeper issues: rural crime (e.g., stolen equipment), underused facilities like 800 Adele ($36K/month empty), and media neglect of meth addiction and healthcare transparency. With PCs likely holding power despite NDP’s past losses (~90K voters) and Greens eyeing a seat, the election underscores how substantive concerns are overshadowed by partisan noise and superficial scrutiny. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
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Manitoba voters are headed to the polls next week.
Will that province remain conservative blue?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
September 10th, Manitobans cast their vote in their provincial election.
Conservative Premier Brian Pallister is asking Manitobans to give him one more term.
And NDP leader Wob Canoe is asking Manitobans to return the NDP to power after sitting out a term.
Now, I've been paying close attention to Manitoba because they were the first provincial government to swing back conservative after Justin Trudeau was elected federally.
They were the first domino that fell before Ontario, before Alberta, before Quebec, and before New Brunswick.
Now, my guest tonight has been an independent journalist in Winnipeg for a very long time.
You've seen him before.
He's becoming a bit of a regular on the show.
And he's been watching the polls and the issues that matter in Manitoba.
And he's also been watching the mainstream media coverage of the election.
Has it been as terrible as what we experienced here in Alberta a few short months ago?
Or is it as bad as what we're seeing unfold at the federal level right now?
Marty Gold joins me in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon to discuss all this and more, plus his predictions for Election Day.
Joining me now for an update about all things Manitoba as the election approaches is independent journalist Marty Gold.
Hey, Marty, thanks for joining me.
We've got a lot to talk about.
Holy moly.
With the election approaching, one of the great things that you uncovered that I don't think the rest of the mainstream media really touched on was a poll in Manitoba that showed the PCs and the NDP in a dead heat.
The poll was flawed, but you dug down that extra level to show that there was something a little bit more, I don't know, sinister at play.
Well, it wasn't really me, honestly.
Don't be modest.
Don't be modest.
No, no, no.
Credit card does go to the Liberal Party of Manitoba.
The poll came out, the election was called on August 13th.
And, you know, you and I had had the discussion about me keeping an eye on media coverage of the election, as well as the election issues themselves.
And CBC, it didn't take long for the election coverage by the mainstream media to go sideways.
And the taxpayers got to pay for this one.
A reporter at CBC, you know, it's a weekend.
I heard all sorts of excuses were bandied about.
It's a weekend, you know, shardstaff, this, that.
And here a poll comes out on a Friday, put out by an organization that nobody had ever really heard of before called Converso, claiming that the NDP and the PCs, four days after the election was called, that they're the headline, in dead heat, heading into Manitoba election poll suggests the previous gulf is narrowed, gulf rather, is narrowed.
And this is how CBC portrayed this poll by Converso.
The next morning, the Liberals had a press release out that was getting good circulation before even the mainstream media had been able to look at the CBC story.
They said, well, the website doesn't identify who owns, runs, or works for the company.
It's full of red flags.
The poll is supposedly uncommissioned.
They didn't disclose their background or that there's a link between the company owner and the NDP, according to, I think it was a letter that he himself had written to the Globe and Mail, no, Toronto Star, in 2007.
And this is because here's the poll showing the NDP tied with the Conservatives.
And it would, if there was a nefarious purpose to putting out a poll like that, it would be twofold.
One, to build momentum for the NDP in opposition to the Conservatives, to the Pallister government.
And B, to deflate any hope of the Liberals rising up because of a lack of momentum for the Wabcano-led NDP.
So by the Saturday afternoon, like this is, you know, days after the campaign starts, and the pollster had to issue a statement saying, we didn't weigh the data properly.
We'll get back to you on Monday.
And so when they updated the results based on the belief, the finding that the results were too heavily weighted, this was 1,100 and some odd respondents, that too much weight was given to northern ridings, which are universally new Democratic Party territory, like Flynn Flawn and far-flung places like that, for the most part.
All of a sudden, you came up with new poll results that were within the range everybody would have expected, except maybe the NDP, showing the Conservatives at 35% support, the NDP at 21%, the Liberals at 12, and the Green Party at 8.
Now, this kind of backfired a bit on the Liberals in a way, because the other poll results had them, I think, closer to 15 or 16.
And there's about 20% that either wouldn't say or weren't declared.
So when you look at those kind of poll results and you distribute the undecideds or the won't say so's accordingly, you know, you got the NDP sitting at, you know, more or less 26, 27, 28%, which is not going to cut it for Wabcano's continued leadership.
And that doesn't really result in a lot of riding changes.
So the discrepancy was caused by an overweighting of responses.
Well, now the media has to revisit the issue and say, hey, there's a poll that was put out, and now they've got to correct their results.
And it turns out, so CBC has all the heat on them was a reporter named, I think, Bryce Hoyt, who had reported this.
And again, it's like the reporter just takes a press release, doesn't even look at the polling company.
Because if you look and you see, oh, I wonder who's behind this company, how long have they existed?
How many other polls have they put out?
And there's nothing there, you don't go, wait a second.
Well, not when you're at CBC, because lo and behold, generally speaking, we believe that CBC Knicks would be delighted by any poll showing a neck and neck race, let alone of the conservative government, right?
So they then have to write a correction, a correcting story.
And my compadre, spirited Kenny, picked up on this, as well as a few other people and made sure to send it to me.
That the headline repeated that the poll, corrections to poll suggesting if Amantho, PCs, and NDP are in dead heat.
So it's in the headline.
It repeats in the subhead, Converso poll placed PCs at 31, NDP at 30.
So repeats the false finding.
Then in the first paragraph, repeats the phrase, well, Dead Heat is now a victim of a waiting issue.
Then the next paragraph, they usual poll suggesting the Gulf had narrowed and the two parties are in a dead heat.
Then it repeats the 31 to 30 in the next paragraph.
Then one paragraph dedicated to the liberals, the greens, the undecided, some old says.
And then in the fifth paragraph, one, two, three, four, the fifth paragraph, again, repeating the poll was a despite leading the polls since the election 2016, Brian Powell's progressive conservatives had fallen into a dead heat with Wabkinus' NDP.
So it refuted the original story at the same time while repeating the falsehood five different times, plus in the headline, plus in the subhead.
So, look, I have friends that have worked for CBC.
I've filed things in my past with CBC.
I lived in Canada's north where CBC is absolutely necessary.
But it's instances like that where when people say defund CBC, you can see why people believe that it's, what's the term I'm looking for, Sheila?
Irredeemable?
Yeah.
When you've got a story that they got completely wrong, they were the only ones to bite.
They did absolutely no research into the poll at all.
And then instead of apologizing, instead of explaining, how did this happen?
How did we fail?
And look, stories will get past you and you've got to play catch up.
They double down on it.
Like hoping the guy would say, hey, wait, we reweighted it wrong.
We were right in the first place.
They repeated that, the flawed result basically in every damn paragraph.
Now, another poll that came out, and this one was CP Canadian press coverage, that was really interesting because they had to find a nice way of explaining something.
That something being how unpopular are Manitoba's political leaders?
And so they, to try to get this on the table, and I'm not complaining about the writing, just to show how convoluted political coverage can be, NDP leader Wab Canu was less unpopular than the others, which is just a funny way to have to explain things.
Even this morning, I was at a press conference held by the liberals.
We'll actually talk about later.
And one of the assembled ink stained wretches asked the liberal leader, Dougal Lamont, about the fact that he's less unpopular than all the other leaders.
And Dougal had a good laugh about it because he recognizes that sometimes people don't care about party platforms.
They just vote strictly on the base of the leader.
And in that regard, Canu gets off better at a minus 6% compared to minus 15 for Brian Pallister.
Now, by comparison, Andrew Scheer's an Angus Reed poll federally released the end of August showed the conservative leader federally, Andrew Scheer, minus 14.
So from this, we understand that relatively speaking, more or less, Brian Pallister and Andrew Scheer equally unpopular, I guess a way to put it.
Canoe, a lot less unpopular than his federal leader, Mr. Sing, who's at minus 19.
Prime Minister Trudeau, a minus 32 approval rating.
So, in that regard, comparing the Angus Reed result, which granted his national, not waited for Manitoba, generally speaking, it's fair to say that the Trudeau anchor is not weighing that heavily around the neck of the liberal leader, Mr. Lamont.
Now, one thing that does hang around his neck a little bit is it's hard to get fair media coverage for a third party at the best of times.
In this case, you know, they luckily, with his by-election victory, attained party status in Manitoba the first time since I think since Sharon Carstair's day.
I don't know that they might have attained party status in the early 90s, briefly.
But even when you are an actual third party, as opposed to just a group of opposition members, it's hard to get reasonable press coverage.
And the flip side of Canadian press trying to discuss the favorability and unfavorability of the leaders in a literate way, they ran an article, as did many of the media here, slamming the Conservatives for skipping.
There's been various town halls and such events the Conservatives have not sent representatives to.
Generally, the excuse being if they're organized by the anti-poverty industry, these are a lot of them are NDP activists.
We don't want to walk into a lion's den, so to speak.
So, a Canadian press article from August 23rd that Spirited Kenny picked up on.
Tory incumbents accused of ducking debates in the Manitoba election, and it gave the example of the anti-poverty forum and said a liberal candidate was also there and didn't name the liberal candidate.
Well, you know, media-wise, that's not fair.
If you're going to slam the Tories or any other party for not showing up, if a party sends a representative, they deserve to get their name in the paper, you know, so that people know that this person's put in the effort.
Another thing that Spirited Kenny has done, and he's at Spirited Kenny on Twitter.
He was my senior producer, grew into that role when we were on when the Great Canadian Talk Show was on Kick FM in Winnipeg.
And he was one of the first, along with myself, to do news podcasting in Winnipeg.
He had his own radio show on Kick FM as well.
Kenny's been surveying, it's funny, I almost said foreign media, out of Winnipeg media, foreign to Winnipegers.
You know, when I was on radio, I used to make a point of looking beyond.
We have a condition in Winnipeg, it's called perimeteritis.
We don't tend to look beyond the perimeter highway unless it's to complain about how good Headingley has it since they seceded and how Lorette and these other bedroom communities are growing and prospering.
But he's been keeping an eye on coverage outside of the province.
Privileged Perceptions00:07:37
And the Thompson citizen, in particular, had quite a scoop where Premier Pallister made a visit up to Thompson.
I just want to add parenthetically, a place that I once upon long ago as a young man lived and enjoyed the best darn hamburger and French fries outside, certainly outside of Winnipeg at a place called Popeyes, that didn't serve chicken.
Pallister said a couple of things were really, you know, he was very blunt with the Thompson Citizen.
I didn't catch the name of the reporter.
But it's almost like, you know, the way he talked to that media was different than the way he would talk to media in Winnipeg.
He said that about this, there are a lot of the campaign has been arguments about health care changes to the hospitals, in particular Winnipeg, if money's being cut from budgets or not.
And some of this may or may not be hocus-pocus or nurses being fired.
And Paliser said, no matter how many times you say something that's a lie, it remains a lie.
It's an NDP and a public sector union, nurses' union myth about health care cuts.
So he was really pushing back with very stark language.
And he turned his attention, at least the way the story was written, to Wab Canu on a personal level that kind of surprised me.
According to the story, Pallister knew what it was like to grow up in a household where there wasn't enough money.
And I've heard him say that before many times, including when I've interviewed him, which is why he's big on tax cuts, but that the NDP leader did not.
The house he grew up in was triple of the size I was raised in, and mine didn't have indoor plumbing.
That's a, I don't know if it was triple the size.
I believe Wab Canu was raised in suburban St. Vital and the premier either in or just outside of Portugal Perry in a farming environment.
But that's a very direct broadside.
He went on to say, we might have had spoons in our house, but they were not silver.
Well, again, I've never heard anybody, I've never heard anybody talk about Wab Canu as having a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was definitely better off than the typical Aboriginal person being raised in Winnipeg, his mother being a university instructor.
I'm going by memory.
I believe his father was a, I might be wrong, but I think his father was a chief.
So, you know, not the worst upbringing compared to his peers, so to speak.
Sounds better than middle class to me, actually.
Listen, generally, that's what I've heard about Canu growing up, that he did not exactly have a hard time.
Mr. Canu didn't go to public school.
He went to a private school.
He was handed more benefits than any premier in the last 60 years in this province.
That's the truth.
That was a very surprising.
I don't even know how to describe it.
I mean, it's a weird kind of personal attack.
If the point is that, you know, Canu says he's for the poor and whatever, and he doesn't know what poor is, I do.
I don't know that I would have phrased it that way.
And then the premier went on from there in portraying Canu as being a privileged person and more privileged than, I mean, think of that list.
Walter Weir, I have no idea really what Weir's background was, too old for me.
Sterling Lyon, Greg Sellinger didn't have life easy.
His mom was a single mom and ran a clothing store.
But he's even saying that the other NDP leaders, Mr. Schreier, that even the other NDP and conservative leaders that preceded Canu, Canu had a better life than all of them, which, you know, look, objectively might be true.
It could be correct, but it's just a very, very, again, I can't find an adjective to describe it.
You know, it borders on like a, like a, like a real personal dislike.
Yeah.
Let me tell you something.
It's quite a jealousy.
Strange.
Yeah, but here's, maybe I have a unique perspective on this because I also grew up with next to nothing.
We had the things we needed to be alive, but probably none of the things we really wanted.
And I've got, there are days where I seriously run out of patience from fancy NDP socialists who've never had to want for anything in their life telling me what it takes not to be poor anymore.
And you run out of patience for it.
You get sick of hearing from people who've never experienced poverty tell you what the solutions to poverty are when you've somehow managed to work your way into the middle class.
And maybe Selinger ran out of, or I'm sorry, maybe Pallister ran out of patience.
Now, I can see that.
After a campaign where you're hearing how elitist and how elitist Tories are and how they're beholden to corporations, when I genuinely think that Pallister thinks that he's making changes that are going to help people move out of poverty into the working poor and then into the middle class, I genuinely think he believes he's making those changes.
And it can be pretty frustrating to hear from somebody like Canu, who grew up, I'll say it, pretty privileged, tell you what it takes to help those people.
Well, look, the hard times that Wab Canu faced were of his own doing, his own behavior, the people he chose to hang out with, the lifestyle that he chose to pursue.
But he didn't have a troubled youth by any normative stretch.
And I read his book.
I didn't see anything in there that I, even in my day, grew up around people that had a lot worse off, a lot worse upbringing, a lot worse surroundings than Mr. Canu did.
Another thing that Mr. Palliser did on that northern run, just to complete that concept, he talked about how Canu is a signatory to the Leap Manifesto.
And here you are in Thompson in Manitoba's North, where there's mineral development and natural resources.
And here's Canu saying that he's for the people, but he's actually against the rural economy in Manitoba.
So he made sure to hammer that home, as well as we're saying, as Palliser put it, we're standing against Mr. Trudeau's proposal regarding carbon tax.
And Mr. Canu is supporting it, wants it to go higher, which is a very thin way to cut that french fry because Pallister has also imposed a carbon tax and did not run on it.
Contrary to what his apologists say, he did not run on a carbon tax in the last election.
He was not elected in any way because of his position on carbon tax.
He has, to his credit, tried to minimize the impact of carbon tax and is willing now to challenge it in court.
And Canu definitely wants it to go up.
And that really doesn't play well to people that are employed.
You would think that wouldn't play well.
We'll see.
To people employed in the resource sector of the economy.
I want to go back for a half a second to what you just referenced about people being tired of the NDP preaching at them, a privileged white wine socialist, so to speak, preaching at them about how they are the ones that represent the interests of the poor and of the working class, etc.
In the last election, the NDP lost about 90,000 voters.
And somebody was crunching numbers from the last, I think it was a probe poll, that indicates that a lot of those 90,000 voters are not going to go back to the NDP and that a third of them, I think I heard that a third are going to intend to vote conservative again.
Journalists' Struggle for Information00:05:48
So the NDP is suffering what Stuart, what the conservatives suffered when Stu Murray was leader, running against Gary Dewar in 2003, where 100,000 conservative votes disappeared, never to appear again.
And that's what the mountain that after that, Hugh McFadden and then Brian Palliser had to climb in terms of, you know, really step by step climbing up the mountain again to accrue enough votes to form government.
One situation that emerged that was written about in the Winnipeg Free Press by Dan Lett was about government information laws and the restrictions on the release of government information during election campaigns.
And this has become a political football where some information is released by some departments that bolstered Mr. Palliser's contention about success of his government programs.
The Regional Health Authority, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, as Dan Lett described at the end of August, is a Friday night.
They called a press conference because the lawyers had told the WHA CEO he could read the wait time numbers for emergency and urgent care centers over the phone, but they could not physically produce a document or a web page with those numbers.
So here's Mr. Kluche, and I've been to a few of these WHA press conferences in person, having to read the numbers for half an hour at the Grey's Hospital, the wait time is this.
And I don't know if it would have been between this week and that week or what the metrics were.
Now, Dan Lett described the circumstances about journalists having to cover this that I'll get back to at the end.
But the findings were that, you know, wait times had been, you know, the wait times had gone down marginally, but the numbers overall, as they were being released by the WHA, didn't actually favor the conservative government crowing success.
But, you know, more important, and this was after the WHA refused to release numbers, and then they get pushed to do it because the Palestini government felt that these numbers would be helpful their re-election.
And Dan Lett called it an absurd end to an absurd week in which bureaucrats took turns twisting themselves into semantic pretzels, trying to figure out what they could or couldn't say during the election campaign.
So Manitoba Health put out an update on the health system transformation initiative that Dan Lett says was almost certainly a violation of the Election Finances Act.
And yet there's other instances where they couldn't.
And this act itself is just so vaguely written that it gives any bureaucrat an excuse to not be transparent with the public, to not be accountable because it could be seen as partisan.
And, you know, the way it's written and the way it's being interpreted are two different things.
This is strangling the ability of not just the public, but of journalists to get information, to analyze platforms.
Dan Lett did have one knee slapper here saying the WHA was normally one of the most transparent entities in government.
Don't get me started, but maybe they deal with the free deal with other media outlets.
But he does make the point: if a hard party makes a healthcare pledge, journalists should be able to, on behalf of voters, get the information, put the pledge in a factual context.
There should be no debate that the voter is the big loser with regards to this.
And Dan Lett was absolutely right.
Now, one thing he said, if I may, for nearly 30 minutes, Cluch read out average wait times for roughly a dozen facilities, as he put it, to a handful of journalists who had the misfortune of reading their email hours after the workday had ended.
And this illustrates the difference, in my opinion, and I've seen Dan on the campaign trail.
We've had vigorous debates for 15 years now.
But that's seen a guy that's employed, and people are employed in unionized environments, salaried positions.
I undertook covering the Manitoba election as an obligation because there's nobody else doing independent news reporting of the election.
And I did it unfunded, looking for my own funding sources, making commitments as best I could around my schedule to try to go to events to assess things.
I've honed in on a couple of specific subjects, but I would never view it as a misfortune or read my email to be able to get valuable information about wait times from the WHA.
If Real Cloud said, we're reading this off at 3 in the morning, I would have set my alarm, I would have gotten up, I would have transcribed what he wrote or recorded and then transcribed it and reported on it.
And that's the difference that, you know, often, especially elections, we heard, and again, referring spirit of Kenny, who picked up on this from a couple of different people in the media.
Oh, we're going to have to cover an election in the summertime.
If you don't want to cover elections, get out of the business, guys.
It's easy when you're getting a check.
I'm not getting a check.
I got to earn my own dollars.
I try to come up with my own story angles.
I do this because this is part of the public's right to know.
And I get it.
You know, you're on the weekend, you covered all week.
You're trying to go somewhere, do something.
And oh my God, because they've dicked around so much, now they have to have a press conference at seven o'clock or eight o'clock on a Friday.
But no journalist should ever say they had the misfortune of opening up an email from the WHA calling them to a conference or a conference call where they will get information the public needs to know.
This isn't, you know, some minor statistic about cotton balls or something.
Government's Broken Contract00:06:16
So that's one thing that struck me.
It just kind of irked me that Dan would have said that.
You know, nothing.
I didn't take it personally.
He didn't mean it personally to anybody, but it just showed the mindset of established journalists compared to people like us.
Yeah, we got to hustle.
And elections are not won or lost on bankers' hours.
It's what happens when it happens, right?
That's for sure.
So, you know, for myself, you know, I referenced that there's stories I've covered and a couple that one that we'll get to at the end of this.
I've been able to go to about six press conferences, seven press conferences, a couple of town halls.
I've stuck on, you know, in particular, this issue of I was already covering meth and used needles, and I've been able to create some traction on that by asking questions at town halls of candidates.
The Green Party leader, the Liberal Party leader, that would be James the Dome of the Greens, Dewey Lamont of the Liberals, and a very well-spoken NDP representative in St. Boniface, a candidate against Lamont, Larissa Sims, who's involved in healthcare.
They all criticize the WHA for the number of needles that are being left on the ground in Winnipeg, them failing the exchange part of their free needle programs.
The matter about 800 Adele that I mentioned on your program previously, this facility that the PC government is embroiled in, and the contract dispute is political in nature.
They view the owner, one of the owners, as being aligned with the NDP in the past, and where it appeared that an NDP minister was trying to shortcut a business deal for them in an unrelated matter.
But now we see that the government is on the one hand, everybody's saying we have a public health care crisis.
They're paying $36,000 a month for this empty facility that's got 12 secure bed units on one side and administrative offices and transitional beds for longer-term residential care on the other.
And the parties, the political parties, say, look, if the experts say this building has use, as opposed to putting Tories have proposed a $7 million addition of the Health Sciences Center that would include, again, 12 detox beds, you've already got 12 standing in a building that's got plumbing and got electricity and has secure doors.
So it's a reasonable conversation to try to have about this building fitting into the public health regime.
I was able to raise this matter again at another town hall.
I went to the first one I referenced with the panelists.
The conservatives did not send a representative in St. Boniface.
That town hall was hosted by Mohrburg House.
Marion Willis is the person in charge of that program.
It's a residential recovery program for meth addicts.
She's the one that came up with the idea about this 800 Adele building that other service providers have looked at the building, agree that it's suited.
So here I end up at the Jewish Community campus for a, again, an addictions and I think crime was also on the agenda, but I think it was mostly mental health and addictions.
And they had a QA at the end, and I was able to ask a question.
The panel included two candidates from the Green and the NDP running in an inner city riding in Union Center.
One is a psych nurse and has very direct experience with this kind of stuff: Dr. John Girard for the Liberals, and the health minister, Cameron Friesen, for the Conservatives.
And I asked Mr. Friesen, you know, given they had all spoken positively about Mooreberg House in their remarks and the work that is being done there.
And here's a proposal they've come up with.
This is something that you would look at moving forward.
And he said, well, there's litigation.
I can't really speak.
And there is, upon the contract being unilaterally given notice, and they're getting paid $36,000 till the end of February, but the building was ordered evacuated, and there was some damage left behind that has not yet been resolved that the taxpayer is going to have to foot the bill for.
So the owners turned around and sued Premier Palliser and I think the finance minister Scott Fielding for a goodly amount of money for this breach of contract attempt to pass legislation, et cetera.
So the health minister Cameron Friesen, who I want to be clear, I know the guy and I like the guy.
And if there's some politician I don't like, I'll say so.
I get along with everybody right now.
He said, well, I can't really talk because there's litigation.
And he then proceeded to say, you know, but we have to look out of the taxpayers' interests.
Well, all right, if the rent was too much, then maybe that's because the service program wasn't delivering enough children through the care facility itself, but whatever.
And then he started talking about the building does have air conditioning, the building has an elevator.
Well, first of all, the city of Winnipeg, it's under four stories, is not required.
Number two, and it's three stories high.
Number two, you know, I don't know if Mr. Friesen has ever been in the building.
I have that side, the detox units has air conditioning.
The government licensed this building as a care facility for children.
And when I say the government, I don't mean the NDP.
They started.
The Conservative government kept licensing it.
So if it needed an elevator and air conditioning so bad, why was it getting licensed?
The point is that people see that the government's spending, the government committed, the party in power, seeing re-election, committed to at least paying out some of the remainder of this contract by wanting to break it and then not wanting to talk about the fact you've got a perfectly good building that healthcare professionals see is ideally built, service built to save lives now.
And instead, without having seemingly ever been in the building, the health minister's making comments about the physical facility itself.
And the dumb thing was, there's 21 agencies up in the audience of that town hall that are all prospective renters of that facility.
And here's the health minister not great.
But look, I've made some traction with that issue about the idea to put in something at 800 a Dell and not spending taxpayers' dollars on something new if it's not needed.
Politicians and Property Crime00:03:00
Right.
And so, you know, I was glad to do that.
One thing that came up today in coverage, Global News with a report that the statement being: Manitobans who have been victims of property crime, they're saying they're fed up with having their personal belongings stolen or politicians running in the province's 2019 election.
And in the upcoming federal election, we'll come up with a resolution.
The number of stories, this is in rural Manitoba, just outside of Winnipeg.
One guy had $200,000 of equipment stolen.
They've got cameras up.
They're putting up fences and still they're being victimized.
And I think it was yours truly, I take credit, a few months ago that said, perhaps even on this program and appearance with you, that this issue of crime, regardless of being spurred by meth addiction or other drug addiction, perhaps,
the fact that it's out of control and that every day, every day, somebody knows someone whose bike was stolen, whose garage was broken into, whose ladders, they're stealing ladders worth $1,500 that they can only get $20 or $40 for at a scrapyard.
And one of these days we'll have to go under the responsibility of scrapyards that are accepting all this stolen loot and then putting it through the crusher.
Anyways, that's the media overview, some bit about polls and some about other things.
There's been some very good coverage here.
Jeff Kiel, CTV has been good.
Bartley Kiev is at CBC has got a lot of experience now.
But not a lot of reporters have gone off the beaten track in looking for stories about the election.
And that's, you know, what I've done about, for instance, 800 Edell, what I've done about used needles in the community and that needing to be a bit of an issue.
That's tied back to meth, which ties back to crime.
So I've tried to do my part to come at these stories from slightly different approaches.
Yeah, you've come at the stories and your coverage of the election in a way that voters care about and not necessarily in a way that the party might communicate it to the voters and not in the way that the mainstream media is communicating it.
You're tying all the issues together in a neat little package in a way that's tangible.
People care about property crime and they care about the plague of meth and opioids in our community and they want real solutions.
Now, all the parties have their own ideas about how to deal with this.
And you're presenting all of those, but those are issues that people really, really care about.
And, you know, they're talking about abstract things that or they're talking about safe injection sites and they don't talk about that the opposition to safe injection sites not only from the chief of police based on I'm sure the Calgary and Edmonton experience but from again Marion Willis at Mohrburgh House and and Ian Rabb of Aurora Recovery Services are two individuals I know who personally told me that's just the worst idea possible when it comes to meth,
Conservative Seat Projections00:12:16
that encouraging meth psychosis, this is the net result.
I'm going to have more about that later this week.
I've got one other story I want to briefly just, you know, let your audience know that when this airs, I will have gotten out a story.
Manitoba, the conservative backbencher, got a private member's bill through requiring disclosure of various background information of candidates for this provincial election, particularly criminal convictions, income tax, income tax act breaches, and there's one other field I can't remember.
But I stumbled across something that raised the hypothesis that Bill 240 fall a little short.
And that would be, what happens if you owe a, let's say, a speeding ticket and you don't pay the fine that is due to the provincial court.
Now, it falls short of a criminal matter involving courts.
But on the other hand, when the court has to issue a garnishe order to collect the fine, is that something that if you're running for public office, the public has a right to know?
Does that cross the threshold of the public's best, you know, what the public needs to know about a candidate?
Now, there's at least two examples I found that I'll be reporting on.
One involving that was, I think, reported on in 2016, but I can't find any trace of it online.
But a few people remember that there was a story about the NDP leader, Wob Canute, having not paid some sort of fine, and his wages at the University of Winnipeg were garnished.
And $606 in change was due to the Treasury.
He made about $110,000 a year at the U of W.
So it's not like he couldn't pay it, but for whatever reason, Canute didn't pay it and he was garnished.
But he's not the only person in the legislature who was garnished for a fine, an unpaid fine, to provincial court.
The other person was none other than his deputy leader running for re-election in St. John's, Nahanni Fontaine.
And when this occurred, I don't know when the infraction or conviction occurred.
I didn't look at the file, but the garnished date was Halloween, October 31st of 2017.
She'd already been an MLA for about 18 months.
And so imagine that an MLA doesn't pay a fine due to the crown, gets garnished.
And why does this matter?
A, your tax dollars end up paying the fine, you know, because it's been garnished right off the check.
It's not coming out of her savings account or something, or she's cashing a Canada savings bond from years ago.
The sheriff has to serve the warrant.
He's paid with public dollars.
The payroll clerk that receives it from the Manitoba government, they've got to process it.
They've got to then get the whoever, paymaster, to write a check to the Minister of Finance.
Then on that end, the courts have to report that this payment has been made.
The judgment has been satisfied every other step of the way, paid for by the taxpayer because an MLA did not pay a fine due provincial judges' court.
So the question is, did Bill 240 go far enough?
Or in fact, if you have had a garnish order, not because of a private civil dispute, but a garnishy order issued by the Crown to satisfy a debt to the Crown, is that something voters should know about before they head to the ballot box and look at the names that are in front of them?
Yeah, and I think the timeframe matters too.
Like you and I were talking off camera, if somebody had a little drunken scuffle shoving around maybe 20 years ago in their younger days, I don't really so much care if it's, you know, two guys outside of a bar in, you know, solving a problem the old-fashioned way and they haven't been in trouble in 20 years.
I don't really care if they had a garnishy order before they were in politics and they weren't making good money to be able to pay the bill.
You know, that's subjective.
Now, if they are an MLA ignoring the rule of law, I think we've got another problem on our hands, don't we?
What message does that send constituents if an MLA just defies what is in essence?
It's a court order.
You have to pay by a certain date.
You're allowed, by the way, you're allowed to make payments to make arrangements with the crown nowadays.
You can take up to six months to pay a fine.
You can plead with the court.
I need some time to pay your honor.
They want their money.
They aren't looking to put you in the stockade for not paying.
And was this something that voters should have known about expressly about Mr. Canoe, but in particular about Nihani Fontaine, who's in a bit of a fight in St. John's riding, a longtime NDP stronghold.
But the Liberals are pouring a lot of resources in and the Conservatives are running a non-campaign in the riding this time around.
So, you know, this kind of thing, I can tell you when I've just talked with average people without mentioning Nihani Fontaine's name, just the principle of an MLA.
A lawmaker.
A lawmaker.
And people don't like it.
They don't like that perception and they don't like that behavior, that I can tell you.
So that's the latest story that your viewers can find up at tgcts.com.
And we've got some other stuff going on with the J.CA involving labeling.
I don't know, Sheila, if you picked up on the story about the labeling of wines as being a product of Palestine now being held up by the Liquor Commission or whatever the board is called in Ontario.
And that was initiated by our publisher, Ron East.
I'm sure we'll have a chance to go into that at the end of the month.
Before Russia Shino for Jewish New Year, perhaps we'll be able to go back to the usual subjects I cover.
But for right now, as it pertains to the Manitoba election, the media coverage has been what it's been, whether it's been fair or not.
There hasn't been a huge number of gaffes.
Some of it's been funny.
That fake poll, CBC really, really needs to be held to account for that.
Nice scoop from the Thompson Citizen.
And more generally, is there going to be a change here?
Conservatives might go down six or so seats.
The NDP might pick up a few.
I think they're in trouble of losing a couple that they've held.
The Liberals, if their support holds at 12%, their chance of moving up is not good at that number.
But they could have breakthroughs in a couple of Winnipeg ridings because of redistribution and other factors.
So they could actually maintain party status.
A lot of people are hoping for that.
But you're still looking at a conservative.
I think majority here is 29, gives you a majority.
And I think the conservatives are looking at 32, 33, 34 seats.
I don't think they're sweating right now.
And I think if anybody's sweating, it's Mr. Canu because if they don't get over 30% of the vote, I've heard from numerous sources, the long knives are going to be, are being sharpened and are going to be pointed in his direction on September 11th.
Well, you know, the best kind of guest is one in media because every single question I had to prompt our interview along, you moved right on to my last question, was your predictions for the election.
And you went right into that without even me asking you.
As it turns out, I think the high-end the liberals could end up with six seats.
I don't know that they can get seven, but it's that's I'll explain it after if they do.
You know, I'll do that in a subsequent appearance.
It would be a real like a fluke where things go in their favor, not a fluke like who could have predicted it kind of thing.
But there are a couple of seats there that they're in a position they could take along with the ones that they can hold if they have party status and they get some resources.
They can, you know, they get time in question period, et cetera.
Real issue here is for Mr. Canu, for Wab Canu.
If the NDP, they might retake Seton Brandon and Selkirk and Thompson, but they're at risk in a couple of Winnipeg seats as well from the looks of it.
If he doesn't crack 18 seats in 30% of the vote, and I don't think he can do one without the other, there may be people within the party that are interested in seizing the reins of power.
And I don't know how interested he'd be in hanging around if he doesn't get even within sniffing distance.
Because if you don't have 20 seats, you're not going to catch the conservatives in the next election either, no matter, unless there's a big collapse, no matter who the leader is that succeeds Ballister.
It's a tough time for Wab Canu and interesting times for Mr. Lamont and for Mr. Pallister.
It looks to me like it's a bit of a retirement plan.
Now, Marty, I wanted to give you a chance to, you mentioned where people can find some of your other work, but also why don't you tell us how we can support your work?
Because I think you're doing valuable work advocating for liberty-minded ideas in Manitoba when I really don't think too many other people are.
No, there's not a lot of people do what I do.
I'll tell you that.
Any of my stories on the website is the acronym.
Is that the term?
For the Great Canadian Talk Show, tgcts.com.
And any of the stories that I have posted there that you see in that story will be at the bottom of the story, a link to a page that explains the kind of work I do, why I do it, why I've been involved in citizen journalism in this region for really since 2004, and the means of support in terms of clicking on a link for PayPal or whatever.
I want to cover the federal election as well.
There was some, you know, the support has come in fits and starts, but there has certainly been some very generous supporters from, including from all political parties.
People value independent coverage and value somebody that asks questions that the mainstream media just isn't going to ask about issues that they don't think people care about when we know, like, use needles all over the ground everywhere.
And we know people do care.
So that's the easy way on Twitter at TGCTS.
And there's actually a link in my profile to PayPal.
And I was raised to do this kind of work.
I don't know how many more years I have left or how many more elections I have left in me.
The first election I covered, God, it was 1986.
So if it feels like it's been a lifetime I've been doing this, it has been.
But your support is important because the more time I can spend covering politics, covering current affairs, covering community, I don't have to worry about sources of income that come from outside consulting and other things.
And this is, like I say, nobody else does what I do in this region, and it's too bad.
Winnipeg needs independent media voices.
There's fewer reporters than ever here.
And you've got a lot of reporters now that are worried about framing shots and the lighting and stuff.
And that's not what a reporter's job should be.
And that's what's going on now in Winnipeg.
And I'm sure other media centers.
So any help that you give me helps me contribute to the public discourse, bring information into the public square.
And it's all very much appreciated.
As I said, if people from all walks of political life, people that are non-partisan people from the media industry have gone out of their way to talk to me, to thank me for the stories, especially about Mooreberg House, about Methodiction, about some of these initiatives, some of the announces have been made in the campaign.
In particular, you know, the Liberal Party, I give them credit as a third party trying to find, you know, look, some of their ideas are to people like you and me, not non-starters in regards to the environment or economics.
But when it's come to crime and public safety, they have been bang on.
They've got a candidate, Donovan Martin, in Notre Dame, who's got endorsed today by former police chief Clunis.
And Donovan's been involved in community affairs for many, many years and kids' programs.
And what he's talked to me about that he's finding out door to door, every candidate should have to account for it, but I don't think the media follows up on that very effectively.
It's something that I do, and that even after the election, believe me, what people have told me they care about, I'll make sure MLAs care about in the next session of the Manitoba legislature.
Well, Marty, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
I think we have a date to talk again before the Jewish holidays.
I've written down your predictions for the Manitoba election.
So when we have you back on, we'll see how close you were to right.
Good Choices Matter00:03:44
I think.
Yeah, those weren't mathematically correct.
I'd have to like add the numbers, make sure it comes out.
And I didn't mention the Green Party could take a seat.
They came close last time.
I don't know if their campaign will get them over the top.
They lost in Woolsey by 400 votes.
And Mr. Bedome, the leader, is running head to head against Mr. Canoe and Fort Rouge.
I don't know.
I haven't heard anything about how he feels his campaign is going.
But based on what happened in New Brunswick this week with a bunch of, you know, more than a Baker's dozen NDPers moving over to the Green Party, you know, this could be a sign of things yet to come for your NDP provincial parties across the country.
And it could happen in the West, too, I suppose.
So the numbers may not be mathematically bang on, but yeah, generally, I'll stand by what I've said and we'll see how it turns out.
Fantastic.
Good luck to everybody that's running.
Yes.
Yes.
Huge sacrifice professionally and personally to run in an election campaign.
And particularly if you're a conservative, be prepared for the character assassination.
It takes a brave person to sign up for that just the weeding through your life.
I mean, it's got to be unpleasant.
But you really have to have a commitment to public service to do it.
It's going to really change the nature of who is able to step forward as a candidate in the next 15 years.
And it's not healthy.
You and I, I know, agree.
We've never talked about this.
Absolutely, absolutely not healthy at all.
And even in my position on this Bill 240 issue, I don't, somebody got into a bar fight or some dispute with a neighbor or something, you know, 15 or 20 years ago.
I don't care.
Unless they went to like jail, jail.
And even if they went to jail, they did their time.
I'm not so, I'm not too worried about that.
Now, on the other hand, a lawmaker, you know, willfully defying a court order to pay a fine in the last five years, that raises an eyebrow.
Yeah, I mean, I think as conservatives, yeah.
And I think as conservatives, we believe in redemption.
We believe if you make good choices and be responsible, you're a good citizen and you sort of leave your past behind.
We go around preaching that people should make good choices, pay their taxes, make amends.
And when they do, that should be good enough for us.
And, you know, I think also we do need to take every instance with the facts surrounding that instance.
I mean, like you say, a bar fight, couple of young guys pushing and shoving.
I don't care.
You stomped a guy till near death, then maybe I do care.
Yeah.
Yeah, there is a big, but again, you know, with Mr. Cano, he unprovoked punched a cab driver through the through the door.
Like the window was rolled down summertime.
He skips out without paying, fares a punch.
There's been no indication that the driver was ever compensated for the law because he lost the shift.
He's got to run around and call the cops and stuff.
And I've never received any indication that anybody made good with the driver on that.
That's the kind of thing that kind of lingers.
The undisclosed issue, the things that Mr. Canu didn't previously disclose in his book or whatever.
I mean, his problems are a little different than the typical person that's going to run for office.
And I agree with you.
Somebody has, again, whether it's a DUI or some relatively minor offense where they don't end up going to the Huscow for, you know, for certainly don't go to Stony Mountain Federal Penitentiary or something.
If it's 10, 15, 20 years in their past, that's part of life's experiences.
Show Care, Vote Please00:01:48
If it's something in the last five years before running, yeah, that's something people are going to evaluate differently.
That's true.
I think that's fair.
Okay, Marty, we could talk all day, but I don't think either one of us have all day.
Thanks so much for having me on, Sheila.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
And all those of you that are Manitobans, I know sometimes it seems like it really makes you wonder why, but would you go and vote, please?
Even if you decline your ballot and just show that you care.
Great.
Thanks, Marty.
We'll see you again.
Thank you, Sheila.
Now, I agree with Marty.
I think Manitoba is going to stay conservative blue.
I think the collapse of the NDP federally isn't helping the NDP chances on the ground in Manitoba either.
I also think the pragmatic, and it pains me to say that, Saskatchewan-style Roy Romano NDP is long dead, replaced by social justice activists with goals that are far too radical to be reasonable to even the most moderate of lefties.
But just because I think that Pallister is going to be re-elected, well, that doesn't mean the job for conservative voters is done here.
You need to learn a little something from the Alberta experience.
Keep dragging your Conservative Party back right.
Otherwise, you're going to end up with an Allison Redford-style government that is so centrist and even so left on some issues that they'll make the NDP seem palatable again.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.