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The origins of Autopac: an essay on the possibility of social democratic government in Manitoba.

Article Excerpt
As the title suggests, this article will concern itself with the question of whether or not social democratic government is a real possibility in Manitoba. On the one hand, the question may seem odd. The New Democratic Party (NDP) of Manitoba is a social democratic party. It is currently in power in Manitoba, has governed the province for nearly twenty-five of the last forty years, and will continue governing in Manitoba for the foreseeable future. Clearly if the possibility of social democratic government were defined solely in terms of the electability of social democratic parties, the main question of this essay would be absurd. On the other hand, since the 1980s right up until today, the fundamental insight of democratic socialism--roughly, that a democratically elected government should play an active role in the economy to protect the interest of all members of society, not just a small, elite cross-section thereof--has been losing more and more political currency in Canadian society. (1) Not even social democratic parties have been immune from this phenomenon. Thus by 2001, Doug Smith argues, the NDP government in Manitoba--unlike in the 1970s, where the government "had taken over a number of manufacturing concerns"--found itself in a context where it was unwilling even to consider nationalizing the Versatile tractor plant to save the jobs of the 250 members of CAW local 2224. (2) This was true even though Gary Doer's NDP has been a strong advocate of maintaining existing public infrastructure like Manitoba Hydro, and vigorously fought the privatization of the Manitoba Telephone System in the 1990s.

This does not mean that supporters of democratic socialism have given up on the idea that electing social democratic governments holds value, but it has led to a certain malaise in the social democratic movement. (3) A large part of the problem hinges on how to reconcile the "democratic" component of democratic socialism with the "socialist" component at a time when socialism holds very little popular (and therefore electoral) appeal, and there is as yet no clear way forward. For its part, the current NDP government in Manitoba seems to hold that this question is best contemplated from the government benches--thus erring on the side of populism--than those of the opposition. In the apparent absence of any obvious and politically viable alternative, Manitoba's social democrats have typically--whether tacitly or overtly--endorsed the strategy.

There is a view, however, that says the question of how to reconcile democracy and socialism is unanswerable in principle. James McAllister, the only one to publish a sustained scholarly analysis of an NDP government in Manitoba, maintains that the social democrat faces a dilemma. She must choose either democracy or socialism because parliamentary democracy is inherently conservative and as such, cannot be the vehicle for any major political, social or economic changes. (4) The present article intends to grapple mainly with this claim, by arguing that the implementation of public automobile insurance in Manitoba by the NDP government of Edward Schreyer presents a counterexample to McAllister's thesis. (5) The aim here is not to answer the question of how to reconcile democracy and socialism in the twenty-first century, but simply to establish the legitimacy of the question.

Evidence Against Democratic Socialism

Manitoba's history of social democratic government began in 1969 when on 25 June, Manitobans sent enough NDP candidates to the Legislature to form, with the help of Larry Desjardins, a then independent, ex-Liberal Member of the Legislative Assembly, a precarious minority government. With Desjardins' tentative endorsement, Schreyer's government enjoyed the support of twenty-nine MLAs in a fifty-seven seat legislature. If the NDP's victory came as a surprise to the province's establishment, one can hardly blame them. (6) At the start of the 1969 campaign, the NDP was the third party in the Legislature and without a leader. Schreyer was elected leader only two weeks before Election Day and would remain Premier of Manitoba until 1977, when Sterling Lyon's Progressive Conservatives defeated the NDP.

If it can be said that there is a scholarly consensus on a topic with so little academic publications devoted to it as the Schreyer government, the consensus appears to be that it was not a radically transformative government. (7) Nelson Wiseman sums it up best when he says: "Although the Manitoba of the 1970s was certainly transformed from the Manitoba of earlier decades, the changes were not so much a result of NDP government as of broader, national, economic and social trends." (8) In other words, the Schreyer government's program was not significantly different from what its Liberal and Conservative counterparts were undertaking in other parts of the country. These changes included an exponential increase in the size and spending of the civil service through the 1960s and 1970s and readiness on the part of all parties--albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm--to use public ownership as a policy tool. (9)

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McAllister's study of the Schreyer government concurs with this appraisal. He suggests the financial restraints faced by any provincial government would limit its capacity to institute thoroughgoing social programming. However, he does not believe that those constraints can explain:

what was perhaps even more significant than the Schreyer government's reforms or its failure to innovate in certain areas ... the marginality of the programs and policy changes, which were introduced. Even where a need was recognized and the government was determined to take action, the end product of the policy process was slight; changes were at the margin, resulting in the least possible dislocation. (10)

Examples of this occur in a number of policy areas. For instance, in the Schreyer government's first term, there was a shift in the taxation system from regressive, flat taxes to a more progressive tax regimen. The flat Medicare premiums were reduced by 88 percent while personal income taxes in Manitoba were raised by six percentage points and the corporate income tax was raised by two percentage points. According to McAllister, this was the Schreyer government's "most dramatic measure to redistribute incomes in Manitoba," but by the time, the NDP was defeated in 1977 "both the NDP government of Saskatchewan and the Conservative government of Newfoundland had enacted higher personal income tax rates." (11) Moreover, other governments had comparable personal or corporate income tax regimes. Despite constant upward adjustments of the minimum wage during the Schreyer years, high inflation meant that the benchmark set by the province's Minimum Wage Board was never reached. The minimum wage hovered between 50 to 55 percent of the average weekly earnings of the industrial composite index, five to ten percent below the recommended 60 percent. Thus, there was "very little change in the lives of Manitoba's low-income citizens ... despite the legal power of the government to change their standard of living." (12)

Citing the centralization of power between 1970 and 1977 in the structure of municipal government--particularly in light of the Unicity initiative--as well as a lack of discussion surrounding the question of some form of workers' control at the work place, McAllister concludes that "efforts by the NDP government of Manitoba to increase public participation in government decision making were few and far between." (13) He also contends that housing initiatives undertaken by the Schreyer government were largely due to the significant funds made available by the Liberal federal government. Moreover, these initiatives did "not touch the dominant position of private contractors, land developers, or landlords." (14) This reluctance to challenge established private interests...

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