Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 15, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A9 SATURDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Without Trudeau to target, the Tories lose their way C ANADA’S Conservatives have a unity prob- lem. Not with Canada but with themselves. The whole country united quickly and decisively against the threatening behaviour of U.S. President Donald Trump. Not so much, all Conservatives. Ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned and Trump won re-election, Canadian Conservatives have struggled with finding new footing in this rapidly shifting political landscape. United against Trudeau is not the same as united against Trump. That struggle is now showing up at the polls. Liberals are up, Conservatives are down. Canadi- ans aren’t keen on any ambiguity when it comes to Canadian independence. Alberta United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith started the conservative unrav- elling. A “negotiate, don’t retaliate” proponent, she was the only leader to withhold her signature from the unified “Team Canada” declaration of all first ministers at their Jan. 15 meeting. Calling in virtually from somewhere near the Panama Canal, she made it clear that an “everything on the table, dollar for dollar” approach to retaliat- ing against Trump did not have her support. She would never include cutting energy supplies to the U.S. from her province. Smith’s witting partner is Trump-admirer, businessperson, putative Alberta investor and former Conservative Party leadership hopeful Kevin O’Leary. He once hosted Dragons’ Den; he now shills for a deeply unpopular economic union with America. Smith keeps company with him, including using him to broker a handshake photo-op with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate. To many Canadians, this was Team Alberta, not Team Canada. Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford pulled the conservative unity thread the oth- er way, toward the centre. Although erratic and impulsive in his negotiating strategy (cut electric- ity one day, build Fortress Can-Am the next), he’s been crystal clear in his pro-Canada rhetoric. He literally wore the flag on his head, showing up to the first ministers meeting sporting a “Canada’s Not for Sale” ballcap. Let’s not kid ourselves. Domestic politics are at play here. Ford has called an election demand- ing a new, decisive mandate to deal with Trump with himself cast as “Captain Canada.” Smith’s province and party detest and distrust the Liberal government’s energy and climate policies so much that unalloyed aligning with Trudeau would undermine her leadership. This is making things difficult for federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre. It showed in his shifting responses. He cavilled at first on what Canada’s response should be, squeezed by the polarity between Smith and Ford, refusing to state how forcefully the country should respond. He has since condemned Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat as “unjustified” and stated, “Canada will never be the 51st state.” But his first response missed the moment, creating an impression of hesitation and doubt, not about how Canadian he is but how ‘Trumpian’ he is. Poilievre is rapidly making up for it with a raft of nationalistic policy proposals. He called for eliminating all interprovincial trade barriers to buying two new heavy icebreakers and building a permanent military base in the Arctic. And he is actively rebranding himself, his party and his policies now as “Canada First” as his way of showing the flag. Seeking to echo Wilfrid Laurier’s famous proc- lamation of “Canada first, Canada last, Canada always”, he runs the risk of channelling Donald Trump’s “America First” to swing voters prefer- ring more unalloyed, unambiguous patriotism. That contrast was heightened when former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s strongly stated last week, “I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing.” But the real explanation of this Conservative di- lemma resides with Conservative supporters, not their leaders. Conservative voters in Canada have always tilted towards Trump. A poll last March found 41 per cent of them preferred Trump win- ning to 37 per cent preferring Biden, at the time. Even now, with all that Trump has said and done, that predilection remains. A poll this month by Pallas Data showed 40 per cent of CPC voters today retain a favourable impression of Donald Trump, compared to 39 per cent who do not. When asked whether they approved of Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs, 53 per cent of Conservative Party supporters said they did not approve, compared to 52 per cent of all Canadians who said they did. Navigating this fissure will require political dexterity by Pierre Poilievre. Not with movement conservatives (they believe in him fully) but with unaligned voters who wanted a change of prime minister but not yet, perhaps, a change of govern- ment. In politics, you are defined by your enemies, not just your friends. The animus that bound Canadians and espe- cially Conservatives — Justin Trudeau — is gone. The animus that now binds Canadians, but not necessarily Conservatives — Donald Trump — has arrived. Time for Conservatives to read the room and check their guest list. David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government. Permanent ‘peace’ deal unlikely for Ukraine IT’S taking U.S. President Donald Trump a little longer than the 24 hours he said he would need to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, but his 90-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday comes as no surprise. Neither does the fact that no Ukrainian was on the call, although Trump did brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about it afterward. In some senses, we are all back in the 1930s on this issue, because nobody is asking for justice or seeking the protection of international law for Ukraine. Might makes right, at least here and now, and the question is only whether Russia, with Trump’s help, is powerful enough to force Ukraine to accept a disadvantageous ceasefire. A permanent “peace” deal is extremely un- likely, because neither side has gained a victory decisive enough to achieve its full war aims: for Kyiv, the liberation of all its Russian-occupied territories including the eastern Donbas and the Crimean peninsula; for Moscow, the subjugation of all Ukraine and its reintegration into the Rus- sian empire. Ukraine never had a hope of recovering the territories it lost when Russia seized them in 2014. Most of their residents were ethnic Russians, descended from those who settled Crimea after it was conquered from the Tatars in 1783 or from others moved into the Donbas by the Soviet state in the 1920s and ’30s to run the region’s new coal mines and steel mills. Putin thought he had a window of opportunity to seize all of Ukraine in a surprise attack in early 2022, but his intelligence was faulty. Russian tanks got into the suburbs of Kyiv for a time, but the Ukrainians fought them to a standstill and subsequently recovered about 40 per cent of their newly lost territory (although none of their 2014 losses). And that’s where the war of movement stopped, in mid-2023. All the fighting since then, with total casualties in the low hundreds of thousands on both sides (not the “millions of deaths” invoked by the ignorant Trump), has yielded Russia further advances amounting to less than one per cent of Ukraine’s territory. The war has reached a stalemate, so it might as well stop for a while, and that’s what is likely to happen. A ceasefire along the present front lines will satisfy nobody, but it’s the only line that everybody can agree on — and everybody along that line will stay armed to the teeth. What will they be waiting and hoping for? Not so much a shift in the military balance — if a threefold superiority in troops and weapons didn’t bring Russia victory, a fourfold superiority will probably not do so either — but a shift in the domestic politics in Moscow or Kyiv. Perceived defeat acts as a solvent in any politi- cal system, and both Putin and Zelenskyy will be seen to have failed, so the positions of both will be under threat. Zelenskyy is likely to go first, but Ukraine’s democratic politics offers a better prospect for an orderly transition than Russia, where a decaying oligarchy has little chance of a peaceful political renewal. Ukraine is unfortunate to have Donald Trump as the self-appointed arbiter of its fate, for his admiration for dictators in general and his servile attitude towards Putin in particular suggest that he will not defend Ukraine’s interests very well. However, he can’t just sell the Ukrainians down the river. They wouldn’t accept that, and his own self-image will not permit it. A different Amer- ican or European leader might manage to get Ukraine a 10 per cent better deal, but the room for manoeuvre for leaders on either side is very limited. It’s the circumstances, not the people, that will define the outcome. Meanwhile, the notion that Russia is about to embark on a campaign of conquest — “Today, Ukraine! Tomorrow, the world!” — has set alarm bells ringing in former Russian colonial posses- sions like Poland and bordering countries like Finland. That’s why both of those countries joined NATO, as did most of Russia’s other neighbours. But as an actual strategy, territorial expansion- ism makes no sense for the real Russia of today, a de-industrialized country that makes its living by exporting natural resources and has an economy the same size as Italy’s. It can barely sustain a war with Ukraine, a country with only a quarter of Russia’s population. So Ukraine will be put on hold for a while, and what else will Russia do in the meantime? Very little, in all probability, because it’s not really an imperial power any more. As the wars in Kenya and Cyprus were to Britain and those in Algeria and Vietnam were to France, so the wars in Georgia and Ukraine are to Russia: late imperial reflexes. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Health-care budgeting may be the problem SOME of the issues raised in recently re- leased audits of Manitoba’s health authori- ties during 2019-2024 may not be because of excessive spending, but because of inappro- priate budgeting. If the budgets are not developed based on appropriate cost drivers such as the geographical area that is being served (for budgeting ambulance transportation cost) or “normal” staff absenteeism (for budgeting nurse staffing costs), then the budgets may end up being understated and the variance between actuals and budgets overstated. The variances between actual expenses and budgeted expenses may have nothing to do with workplace culture in the health-care sector, as implied by the audit reports. The independent audits focus their spot- light excessively on the variances between actual costs and budgets, with perhaps less attention paid to whether the budgets are being formulated appropriately. Providing health care is a team sport. For example, a surgery involving a staff of five may need to be cancelled if two of the staff are absent. This may result in the re- maining three staff being less fully utilized but still needing to be paid. By anticipating some staff absences and building in some anticipated slack within the budgets and within the surgical operations schedule, the budgets as well as the surgical operations will be more realistic and the dif- ferences between actual costs and budgets (the variances) will be more meaningful. The audit reports also recommend health authorities that report deficits in a given quarter be required to identify cost-saving measures equivalent to three times the reported deficit within 90 days. This would be almost impossible to en- force, even in the absence of a crisis. If such cost-savings ideas were so easy to produce, they would have been implemented in the first place. Such recommendations reflect wishful thinking, instead of realistic fiscal management. Budgeted costs could go up non-linearly if high patient volume necessitates overtime pay. Such variation in volume needs to be in- corporated into budget formulas, otherwise they will be dwarfed by actual expenses that reflect the realities of exponentially increas- ing non-linear costs. Overtime pay plus staff absences may make the situation exponentially worse. Hiring nurses from private sector agencies in such cases may be necessary for a health agency to continue to operate. Another recommendation is for health- care agencies to implement zero-based bud- geting, whereby every line item of expense has to be justified from zero. This is almost impossible to implement in the health-care sector, where health agencies do not have any choice but to treat patients that walk in through the door or are brought in by ambulances. Some health agencies were imposed a 15 per cent cut in recent years. Others were relying on planning processes based on cost and demand trends from two years ago. It is not clear whether such agencies were then authorized to see fewer patients or allowed to decline cost-intensive treatments. Or to plan for staff burnout during the pandemic. Budgets should reflect the work that needs to be done and the anticipated volume of patients that needs to be treated. Insufficient budgetary resource alloca- tions means inadequately small budgets, and the first symptom of it would be more red ink when actual costs are compared to budgets. Once sufficient resources are allocated and the budgets reflect sound relationships between costs and volume of patients, then the variance between actuals and budgets will be more meaningful. Simple directives such as redirecting eight per cent of administrative costs to frontline workers may not work if the accountabilities are not aligned with the decision-making. Administrative management is essential to make the resource allocation decisions, including the decision to hire nurses from private agencies in order to keep the hospi- tals open. Focusing on cost overruns between actual expenses and budgeted expenses requires first identifying if budgets are designed properly and whether budgeted expenses re- flect the realities of health-care operations. Amin Mawani is the director of the Master of Health Industry Administration program at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. DAVID MCLAUGHLIN GWYNNE DYER AMIN MAWANI ETHAN CAIRNS / THE CANADIAN PRESS Without Justin Trudeau as a target, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his party are scrambling. ;