Steve Ashton: End of a Northern Manitoba NDP political dynasty?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A clever headline might say something like “Ashton fades to black” or “NDP  Orange: The New Black.” Clever perhaps. But not accurate. Because there is nothing about Steve Ashton that suggests fading away or going gently into the good night. That’s not who he is. Not quite House of Cards material perhaps, he is still one of the toughest bare-knuckle street-fighting politicians of any party in Canada, not just the NDP. Internal party opponents who underestimate his resolve do so at their own political peril.

In a two-way leadership race against 35-year-old rookie Fort Rouge constituency NDP MLA Wab Kinew, Ashton, 61, has decided on the high-risk gambit of revisiting two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when the leadership aspirant was 21 years old. The alleged victim has not been identified and both assault charges were stayed at the request of the Crown in 2004.  A charge that is stayed can be reactivated within one year of a judge granting a stay of proceedings, but seldom are, and such was the case with Kinew’s.

Wab Kinew, a former CBC Radio and TV reporter and host, author, rapper, and later acting associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Winnipeg, was born on the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation near Nestor Falls, Ont. in Northwestern Ontario’s frontier Sunset Country in the Central Time zone, but grew up mainly in suburban Winnipeg. Aside from the two stayed assault charges from the Spring of 2003, Kinew was no saint, a fact he readily admits.  Even before the later stayed assault charges, Kinew was convicted in February 2003 of failing to provide a breathalyzer or blood alcohol sample in a driving case, and was fined $922. After the stayed domestic assault charges, he was convicted in June 2004 of assaulting a cab driver and fined $300. As recently as October 2014, an unpaid speeding ticket eventually resulted in $606.50 of his wages being garnisheed by the Crown from his wages at the University of Winnipeg. Kinew has also apologized for several misogynist and homophobic tweets he made from his Twitter account, particularly back in June and July 2009, when he was actively rapping and by then 27 years old. And on Oct. 17, 2012, Kinew tweeted, “Riding in my limo back to my king size sweet [sic] feeling really bad for those kids in Attawapiskat #haha #terrible #inative.” Kinew was by now 30.

All told, CTV News Winnipeg reported Aug. 22, Kinew has been charged with more than a dozen offences, most dating back to 2003 and 2004.

So why is it such a high-risk gambit, one which clearly smacks of political desperation, some, if not many, would say, for Steve Ashton to go on the political offensive over those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when he was 21?

First, Kinew, if not in detail always, has nevertheless many times in many places in recent years, including on social media and in his 2015 book, The Reason You Walk,  apologized for his past behaviour.

Secondly, in April 2016, the voters of  Fort Rouge elected Kinew as their MLA, as he defeated then Manitoba Liberal leader Rana Bokhari, Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon and Green Party candidate Grant Sharp, to hold onto the NDP seat held by retiring incumbent Jennifer Howard, a former NDP cabinet minister.

Thirdly, the Manitoba NDP vetted Kinew, as they did Ashton, and sanctioned both their leadership bids.

The narrative that Kinew has apologized for his past and is a changed, albeit gradually, man is a powerful one for anyone who believes youthful indiscretions can and often are followed by remorse, forgiveness and redemption. Wab Kinew has clearly made something of his life and is a net contributor to society. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t make a good leader for the Manitoba NDP.

At the same time, it also true that much less is known publicly about those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 than the other matters, both criminal and non-criminal, that he has apologized for. Zita Somakoko, a Manitoba NDP member and domestic violence survivor advocate, has suggested to several media outlets this week that Kinew needs to be more forthright in explaining the stayed assault charges from 14 years ago. CBC News Manitoba reported today that Somakoko had “shared her dismay at Kinew’s responses with Steve Ashton….”

Several Manitoba media outlets received two anonymous emails last week containing previously-unreported details about Kinew’s legal history, including the two stayed assault charges against a woman from 2003.

Mohinder Saran, the MLA for The Maples, who was booted from the NDP caucus earlier this year as the result of sexual harassment allegations, which he denies, recently ordered copies of Kinew’s complete court documents.

Saran told CBC News Manitoba that he is unofficially working on behalf of Ashton’s campaign to attract delegates, but declined to comment about the court documents. Kinew currently has 588 committed delegates for the Sept. 16 leadership vote to Ashton’s 339 delegates. Saran denied sending documents to Ashton’s campaign or the media.

CBC News Manitoba compared the metadata — essentially, the file’s digital “fingerprint” — from the PDF document containing Kinew’s court records sent to media anonymously to that of the PDF containing Steve Ashton’s personal disclosure statement from last week, showing no involvement with the criminal justice system, which was sent via his campaign’s email account.

The two files were created using the same make and model of scanning device, CBC News Manitoba reports.

This does not prove that the two files were necessarily created on the same printer, however, CBC News Manitoba says it analyzed dozens of PDFs sent to media from various other NDP groups and sources, none of which were made using the same device.

Political analyst Christopher Adams, vice-president of Probe Research, and an adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Political Science, who has served as an election desk analyst for various media outlets in Manitoba, told CBC News Manitoba that while this is not proof of direct involvement by Ashton or his campaign, it does put his campaign under the microscope.

“If I were Perry Mason, this is strong circumstantial evidence,” he said, referring to the famous fictional lawyer.

“I am not a lawyer. I am a political scientist, but it does start showing you that maybe something is coming out of the [Ashton] campaign,” said Adams, who added “that sometimes supporters go ‘rogue’ and use tactics not authorized by a political campaign.

Ashton said Saran was not involved in his campaign and denied any knowledge of how the leaked court documents were sent to the media.

“I don’t know. I was a sent a copy [of the anonymous email received by media] last week, so I don’t know what the story is there,” Ashton told CBC News Manitoba.

“When the campaign received the [anonymous email] our decision was not to go public with it. Not to leak it, not to go public,” he said.

CBC News Manitoba says they requested a copy of the email that Ashton says his campaign received. “He has not responded to this request.”

“I think Ashton is right to ask about what were those things?” Adams told CBC News Manitoba. “Who was the person involved? What was the actual incident that caused this, that eventually led to the stay of charges? I think Ashton is kind of doing what we would expect him to do,” he said.

Ashton, who had been the marathon man of Manitoba politics, last year did what every political analyst and commentator in the province believed was impossible. He lost the supposedly safest NDP seat in Manitoba to Progressive Conservative rookie Kelly Bindle by 210 votes.

There have only been 13 provincial general elections since the Thompson constituency was created in June 1969. Progressive Conservative Labour Minister Ken MacMaster, who won the seat in the Oct. 11, 1977 election, and held it for four years until 1981, was the only Tory to ever hold the seat before Bindle. Before MacMaster, Ken Dillen, who ran against Ashton as a Liberal in the 2011 election, held the seat for the NDP from 1973 to 1977, while Joe Borowski held the seat in 1972-33 as an Independent NDP, and from 1969 to 1972 as an NDP member. Borowski defeated former Thompson mayor Tim Johnston’s father, Dr. Blain Johnston, by seven votes in the Feb. 20, 1969 byelection in the old provincial constituency of Churchill, which included the town of Thompson. He went on four months later to win the newly-created constituency of Thompson in the June 25, 1969 general election.

Ashton had won nine consecutive elections between 1981 and 2011 before going down to defeat in 2016 in his bid for 10 in a row. Ashton was first elected to the Manitoba legislature at the age of 25 in the Nov. 17, 1981 provincial election, defeating MacMaster by 72 votes.

He has a much less impressive track record to date, however, in his two previous bids for the Manitoba NDP leadership in 2009 and 2015. In a two-way race in 2009, NDP finance minister Greg Selinger took almost two-thirds of the ballots cast and sailed to victory in the two-way race with 1,317 votes to Ashton’s 685, while in 2015 Ashton finished third on the first ballot with a similar share of the vote totals.

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This is how Parliamentary democracy works: We change the governing party from time to time

Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.

There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.

The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.

This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.

One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.

It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.

During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the  74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.

Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.

The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21^st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19^th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.

Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.

My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.

As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”

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The death of Flora MacDonald is a reminder of a Canada where Red Tories were decent people, not mortal enemies to be engaged in endless ideological combat with

I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario from the late 1950s through the mid-­1970s. I was 13 when provincial Progressive Conservative “Big Blue Machine” leader Bill Davis (a.k.a. “Brampton Billy”), who is now 85, succeeded to the premiership in 1971, a job which had had been in the party’s hands since the days of George Drew, who had become premier in 1943. I wouldn’t have considered Davis anything but an establishment Conservative in those days, certainly not a Red Tory. But politics can be an exercise in relativity, both real-time and historically, as much as principle, sometimes more, and this was after all 35 years before Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power federally.

In 1971, Ed Broadbent, not yet federal NDP leader, having lost that year to David Lewis, was still a backbench opposition MP for the federal riding of Oshawa­-Whitby, elected by a 15­-vote plurality in June 1968, during the spring and summer of Liberal “Trudeaumania” for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, as Broadbent, now 79, dispatched seven-­term Progressive Conservative incumbent Mike Starr, a former federal labour minister, and Canada’s first federal cabinet minister of Ukrainian descent, along with Liberal challenger Des Newman, now 84, who had been elected as the youngest mayor in the history of Town of Whitby two years earlier in 1966.

As my parents liked to point out, Ed Broadbent had been their Oshawa Times paper boy, I believe in the late 1940s, when they rented a red Insulbrick asphalt-siding duplex near the top of Church Street (now part of Centre Street), and within sight of the south-facing Adelaide Avenue green wooden fence of Parkwood, where Sam McLaughlin, the Canadian automotive pioneer and later philanthropist, who turned 100 in September 1971, still lived. Adelaide was the name of his wife, who had died in 1958.

“Colonel Sam,” honorary colonel­-for­-life of the Ontario Regiment, had been president of the family­-owned McLaughlin Motor Car Company, which started in 1908 and was sold a decade later in 1918 to facilitate the formation of the Canadian operation of General Motors of Canada. Sam McLaughlin was named president of GM Canada and remained in the job until 1945 when he stepped down and was named chairman of the board, a position that he held until his death in 1972.

My dad, William Marshall Barker, on the other hand was an hourly-rated General Motors of Canada employee, and proud member of what was then Local 222 of the United Autoworkers of America (UAW). He always drove a GM car. Of course, you couldn’t buy a Ford, much less any other kind, new in Oshawa from a dealership when I was a kid. There were only General Motors dealerships, although in time a Ford dealership did open just across the municipal boundary in Whitby. During the lengthy fall strike of 1970, we carried on, which meant steak-and-fried onions for dinner every Saturday night, even if we had to tighten our belts elsewhere. My dad knew the difference between the “company” and the “union.” Between “white collar” and “blue collar.” He never had any confusion on those points. But at the same time, I never heard him have a bad word to say about our Parkwood neighbour up the street, Colonel Sam, also know as “Mr. Sam.” Such were the complexities of class relations in the world I became a teenager in in the early 1970s.

And it was also the world that Flora MacDonald in October 1972 won her first federal election in, as a Progressive Conservative for the riding of Kingston and the Islands, the riding represented by Sir John A. Macdonald a century before, and the only woman among the 107 Tories elected and one of only three women in the House of Commons during the Liberal minority government of Pierre Trudeau. She held the seat until her defeat by Liberal Peter Milliken in November 1988.

Milliken, now 68, it should be noted, a lawyer by profession and chosen by his peers to serve as speaker of the House of Commons from January 2001 until his retirement as an MP in June 2011, over that decade was one of the finest speakers Parliament has been served by. In a historic ruling on April 27, 2010, he adopted a Dec. 10, 2009 order of the  Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan compelling the Harper Tories to produce documents regarding Afghan detainees, which the government had previously refused to turn over to Parliament on national security grounds.

It was not the first time Milliken had acted decisively in making important decisions from the speaker’s chair. In November 2007, he issued the first speaker’s warrant, compelling Karlheinz Schreiber to appear before the House of Commons ethics committee to testify on his business dealings with former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, since February 1913 when R.C. Miller, of the Diamond Light and Heating Company in Montreal, was compelled to appear before the public accounts committee to testify about $41,000 in heating contracts. Miller, who refused to testify, was summoned before the Bar of the House of Commons, a brass rod extending across the floor of the chamber inside its south entrance and beyond which non-members or House officials are not normally allowed. He was found in contempt of Parliament and jailed in the Carleton County jail for the duration of the session until Parliament was prorogued about three and a half months later.

As well, on May 19, 2005 Milliken cast the-tie breaking vote on a confidence motion determining whether the Liberal minority government of then prime minister Paul Martin, who is now 76, would continue or fall when the House of Commons was deadlocked 152 to 152. The speaker only votes in the case of a tie.

With classic precision and reserve, Milliken explained his vote simply by saying, “The speaker should vote, whenever possible, for continuation of debate on a question that cannot be decided by the House.”

Flora MacDonald, who was born in June 1926 in North Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, died yesterday in Ottawa at the age of 89. You can read all kinds of well­-written obituaries,
tributes and other remembrances of her today online at places like the Globe and Mail
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/conservative­trailblazer­flora­macdonald­dies-
aged­89/article25714535/) and The Whig­-Standard in Kingston
(http://www.thewhig.com/2015/07/26/macdonald­a­true­pioneer)

Lots of ink will be quite properly spilled today on how MacDonald rose from being a proudly-trained secretary from Empire Business College in Sydney and a bank teller with the Bank of Nova Scotia to being appointed by former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark as Canada’s first female secretary of state for external affairs in June 1979. While the Clark minority government was short-lived, MacDonald played a pivotal, but at the time secret, role early in the Iran Hostage Crisis in Tehran from November 1979 to January 1980, authorizing false Canadian passports and money transfers for the six American diplomats ­­ Robert Anders, Cora Amburn­-Lijek, Mark Lijek, Joseph Stafford, Kathleen Stafford and Lee Schatz ­­ being sheltered by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and John Sheardown, former first secretary at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.

Flora MacDonald’s death represents part of the inevitable passing from our midst of a generation of Canadian politicians from an era in all parties when they could disagree with each other with civility, and us with them, as voters, without being disagreeable and when not every utterance was calculated for its value as ideological blood sport. MacDonald, her father a trans-Atlantic telegraph operator, grew up during the Depression in one of Canada’s poorest areas. By the time MacDonald came of age, Red Tory was a label worn as a badge of honour, not a Scarlet Letter, and the word “progressive” actually proudly preceded “conservative” in the old Progressive Conservative Party. Even some of us who are more likely to be thought of as democratic socialists miss those days.

While the Canadian political system does little to encourage or reward voters who depart from partisan voting along party lines to support candidates seeking office as MPs federally or MLAs, MPPs or MNAs provincially, I’ve often thought, as heretical as it sounds even to me, that had I lived in Kingston and the Islands when Flora MacDonald was MP, say in the 1979, 1980 or 1984 federal general elections, I’d have quite likely been marking my “x” beside a PC candidate for the first time.

Mind you, Flora MacDonald knew better than most Canadian politicians just how unpredictable actually getting that “x” on the ballot, when push comes to shove, can be. At the February 1976 PC leadership convention, where she lost to Joe Clark, tracking by her operatives and surveys by several television networks had found 325 delegates who insisted they would cast first ballot votes for her. Of the 325 delegates who entered the polling stations wearing “Vote-for-Flora” buttons, 111 of them cast ballots for someone else it was soon discovered when the votes were tallied. The phenomenon became known as the Flora Syndrome, and Clark, who is now 76, went onto to defeat Claude Wagner of Quebec on the fourth ballot.

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