Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - March 2, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A7 NEWS I TOPIC ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2022 THINK TANK PERSPECTIVES EDITOR: BRAD OSWALD 204-697-7269 ● BRAD.OSWALD@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 WEDNESDAY MARCH 2, 2022 Ideas, Issues, Insights EVAN VUCCI/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS While serving as attorney general, William Barr was one of Donald Trump’s most steadfast supporters. Now, with a new book out, he’s distancing himself from the former president. Trump’s lackeys can’t outrun past W ILLIAM Barr has travelled the road to Damascus and arrived with a book he’d like you to buy. The former U.S. attorney general, whose tire- less labours in president Donald Trump’s service made him one of the most sinister villains in an administration brimming with moral depravity, is here to tell you that he was shocked, shocked by what he saw. “Trump cared only about one thing: himself,” Barr writes in a new book that is full of criticism of the former president. “Country and principle took second place.” You don’t say. Barr’s conversion from Trump lackey to Trump critic is particularly vivid, but he might not be the last person to have such a change of heart. It all depends on how long Trump’s hold on the Republican Party lasts, and how that shapes the ambitions of other Republicans. Barr is in his 70s now, and he may not be eager for another government job, so a rehabilitation tour is in order. As a shrewd operator, Barr surely knows history will not be kind to Trump, so he wants to make sure everyone knows how repulsed he was by what he saw. But does he think we’re going to just forget the way he enabled Trump’s assault on the integrity of the justice department and the entire govern- ment? The way he misled the public about what was in the special counsel’s report on Russian electoral interference to make Trump seem utter- ly innocent, when Barr had read the report but it had not yet been released? The way he forced out U.S. attorneys who might investigate Trump? The way he spread preposter- ous lies about voter fraud in advance of the 2020 election? The way he took extraordinary steps to help Trump cronies escape accountability for their criminal conduct? Barr’s name will forever be tied to Trump’s, as it should be. For other Republicans, this is a tricky moment, made deeply uncomfortable by the presence of a pro-Vladimir Putin wing within the GOP. Even if it consists primarily of Trump and the repellent Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who has gone from spreading COVID-19 disinformation to running segments so friendly toward Putin that they’re replayed on Russian state TV — it was merely an embarrassment before now, rather than a political problem. But with nearly the entire world united against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans find themselves caught between joining that popular cause and repudiating Trump, which no one who wants to have an electoral future in the GOP thinks they can do. So on ABC’s This Week, host George Stepha- nopoulos tried to get Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to condemn Trump’s effusive praise of Putin’s invasion, leaving Cotton to awkwardly dodge the question. Sensing blood, Stephanopoulos asked the question four times, and Cotton kept dodging. As a Republican with presidential ambitions of his own, Cotton would almost certainly prefer that Trump fade away, or at least not run for the White House. Unfortunately, Trump seems to be doing just the opposite: Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, he again vowed another bid. “We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” he said to the cheering crowd. “We’re going to be doing it again a third time.” This is the ongoing dilemma for Republicans: when Trump gets attention these days, it’s usually because he’s facing more legal jeopardy for his ethically challenged business practices, or be- cause he said something shocking or despicable. If Trump says, “Tax cuts are good and abortion is bad,” it doesn’t make news; if he offers tributes to murderous dictators, it does. That means Republicans will keep getting asked to defend the worst of Trump’s words and deeds. They might try to say it’s not their busi- ness or they’re concerned about more meaningful issues, but that just opens them up to more ques- tions, given that there are few things reporters are more drawn to than intraparty tension. Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, he will continue to hang over everything Repub- licans do. They’ll have to answer for their own roles in enabling him. They’ll have to say whether they agree with what he says. And they have to detail the limits of their future support for him. There will be no resolution to this problem as long as Trump and Trumpism exist. Nor will Republicans escape their own recent pasts. No amount of tell-all books and pleas to move on will make Trump’s aides and supporters emerge from this period looking unsullied. But perhaps they knew this when Trump asked them to set fire to whatever integrity they had, to hitch their own ambitions to his debased crusade for self-aggrandizement, and they agreed. Barr was one of the most enthusiastic volunteers, and like the others, he will not be able to rewrite history. They made their bargain, and they cannot hide who they are and what they did. — The Washington Post ‘Business as usual’ won’t drive economic recovery IS “business as usual” best for business in Mani- toba? Manitoba’s government seems to think so. Last week it created an Economic Develop- ment Board of cabinet to attract investment and promote trade. In the highly competitive post-pan- demic race for growth in a newly destabilized world with declining private-sector investment in the province, Manitoba announced it is launching — wait for it — a new government committee. This is not to say it will not do some good. It will, at the margins. But if Manitoba wants to leapfrog ahead, it needs a new approach to eco- nomic development with sharper tools, a brand boost and a new attitude. That is exactly what the final throne speech and budget of the Pallister government was putting in place. It included a new private sector-led investment and trade agency called Invest Manitoba, a venture capital fund and a tax competitiveness review. Each offered a new, different and, yes, conser- vative way to create jobs and growth. Together, they promised a significant departure from past economic development practice. Once advocated by the province’s business com- munity, these initiatives are now either dead or dormant. The Stefanson government nixed Invest Manitoba in favour of a politician-led economic development board. It remains silent on creating a venture-capital investment fund, despite the province reaping only $5 million from just three private venture-capital deals in the first half of 2021 — the least in the country, according to the Canadian Venture Capital Association. And it put tax competitiveness at the bottom of its first throne speech, signalling a lower priority. This is a miscalculation. Manitoba’s economy weathered the pandemic relatively well. Employ- ment levels today exceed pre-pandemic levels. Last month, the unemployment rate was the lowest in the country on a yearly average basis. The built- in resilience of the province’s diversified econo- my, coupled with provincial and federal financial support for businesses and employees, worked. But a rebound is not a springboard. Manitoba is just back to where it was before; that does not guarantee it can get to where it needs to be. The inescapable reality is this: growth is essen- tial to generate the revenue to pay for more health care, education and social services and, yes, bal- ance the budget. It’s why the Pallister government’s last budget said this: “We will grow our way out of deficit and back into balance by investing in more jobs, tax relief and economic growth.” The single biggest determinant of that growth is new private-sector capital investment. Three years ago, the province set a target to be in the top three provinces for growth in private capital investment. In 2018, Manitoba was third; in 2019, fifth; and in 2020, with the pandemic con- traction, ninth. The province needs to focus re- lentlessly on private-sector investment to ensure this slippage does not turn into a slippery slope. Which brings us back to Invest Manitoba. This province has a slew of local or sectoral econom- ic-development organizations, pursuing mostly different and unco-ordinated agendas. Unfortu- nately, the Pallister government itself contributed to this imbroglio by creating a new rural econom- ic-development agency and economic-develop- ment secretariat within government, rather than tackling the jurisdictional problem at its core – until its Invest Manitoba idea. The mandate of this now-defunct initiative was to market Manitoba abroad by creating a one-stop, single-window agency to funnel new investment into the province and promote trade out of the province. Crucially, it was to be led by the private sector, which knows best where and how to secure capital investment. Government’s role was to get out of the way of that investment, by clearing the bureaucratic underbrush of regulatory roadblocks and red tape that prevented new capital from being capitalized on. It would not pick private winners with public money, but instead lean in with supporting infra- structure investments such as road or water and sewage projects. Helmed by a private-sector board and armed with a new venture-capital fund, it was meant to have the independent drive, business savvy and financial tools needed to attract new investment and promote trade in the province. Most of all, it was to be the foundation of a new brand promise for Manitoba as the best place in Canada to invest, grow and live. In politics, being comfortable is easier than being bold. With the economic world around us changed since COVID-19 and the geopolitical world altering even more with the Russian inva- sion of Ukraine, reaching backwards for guidance is a risky strategy. The province’s announced approach gives up a breakthrough strategy for more of the same. It smacks of corporatism, not conservatism. Frankly, it would not be out of place in past NDP governments. A chance remains to recover from this missed opportunity. Manitoba’s first formal post-pandem- ic budget is coming soon. Perhaps then, Manito- bans will find out whether “progressing together” is genuinely different or simply business as usual. David McLaughlin was clerk of the executive council in the government of Manitoba in 2020-21. He was campaign manager for the PC Party of Manitoba in the 2016 and 2019 elections. New health-care funding model needed OVER the last 25 years, I have been involved in Manitoba’s health-care delivery. I have served as chairman of the University of Manitoba’s board of governors, thus observ- ing the roles of its medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Manitoba Department of Health. Furthermore, I have served as chair of the board of St. Boniface Hospital and participated in the provincial government’s Manitoba Healthcare Task Force. This experience has led me to conclude the Canadian health-care delivery system is an unsustainable, failed system. Real reform would involve true competition, patient choice, patient focus and sustainability. This cannot be achieved by tinkering around the edges of a failed system. The Canadian health-care delivery sys- tem is a government-created monopoly, both government-funded and -operated. The most comparable system was the U.S.S.R.’s old system of producing and delivering food, one wherein the government planned, controlled and operated. With it, one of the most agri- culturally fertile areas in the world could not feed its people. Almost all Canadian health-care funding is based on a block funding model, bringing negative counterproductive results. Funding, usually based on last year’s budget plus some inflationary component, is subject to political interference, influence and bias. This leads to an environment of “spend it or lose it,” discouraging efficiency and innovation. The current negative economic outcomes in the block funding model are the direct result of the absence of prices and trend-predictive price signals. Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek would predict that the absence of price signals would doom our current system to inefficiency and unsustain- ability. Tinkering around the edges of Canada’s failed system will not transform it into an effi- cient, innovative, patient-centred system. How can our current system be reformed to an efficient, innovative, patient-centred system? Hayek is right; we need to introduce prices and price signals. But, given that health-care delivery is within provincial jurisdictions, it would take genuine courage to change and to embark on an activity-based funding model. A further transformation would be to introduce medical savings accounts simi- lar to those in the Singapore model. As a percentage of GDP, Singapore spends 41 per cent of what Canada spends (4.46 per cent of Singapore GDP, compared to 10.79 per cent in Canada, using 2018 World Bank stats) and achieves vastly better outcomes. Activity-based funding is a system in which hospitals and programs are not funded based on last year’s budget, but instead by their ac- tual level of activity, the complexity of those activities and the quality of the outcomes. A price list for health-care activities would need to be developed (think of the delivery of dental care). This could be achieved in parallel with the authorization of private clinics and hospitals using the same prices, which would effec- tively honour the single-pay/public-funded component of the Canada Health Act. The change would enhance patient choice for most procedures and, because the funding follows the patient, it becomes a totally patient-fo- cused system. This topic is critically important to the fu- ture of health care in Canada. Patient choice is successfully used in other comparable in- dustrialized nations, such as Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. The Common- wealth Fund provides detailed comparisons of costs and outcomes of health-care delivery systems of industrialized nations. A further transformation would be to introduce medical savings accounts similar to those in the Singapore model. As a percentage of GDP, Singapore spends 41 per cent of what Canada spends (4.46 per cent of Singapore GDP, compared to 10.79 per cent in Canada, using 2018 World Bank stats) and achieves vastly better outcomes. Canada spends more and gets among the worst outcomes of industrialized nations providing universal-access delivery systems. We now have a highly rationed system without choice and with multiple gatekeepers. An opportunity to benchmark systems and cherry-pick best practices is available, if only our governments would take the initiative. Wayne Anderson is chair of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. © Troy Media PAUL WALDMAN DAVID MCLAUGHLIN WAYNE ANDERSON A_07_Mar-02-22_FP_01.indd 7 2022-03-01 5:28 PM ;