Gary Doer will step down as Manitoba’s 20th premier just shy of the 10th anniversary Oct. 5 of his being sworn in. For Doer and the provincial NDP, the period since 1999 has been a remarkable decade, marked by three successive majority governments – the latter two with more seats in the legislative assembly than the previous one – an unparalleled feat for the party.
The day after Doer announced his resignation Aug. 27, Prime Minister Stephen Harper nominated him as the Canadian ambassador to the United States in Washington, replacing outgoing former Mulroney Tory cabinet minister Michael Wilson.

The ambassador-designate is a good choice for the post, marking the first ambassadorial appointment in 25 years of an NDP leader to such a post by a Conservative prime minister. The last was when Brian Mulroney appointed former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York in 1984.

Canada’s longest-serving premier currently, Doer has strong contacts with Western governors and knows regional cross-border trade issues well. As premier, he likely knows as well as any provincial or federal politician the files on electric power export to the U.S. Midwest and the long-dreamed of north-south Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, which would connect Mexico City to Winnipeg, perhaps via the hub-and--gateway cities of San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Omaha, Fargo and Minneapolis.

Doer, 61, is a Winnipeg native and went to St. Paul’s High School, run by the Jesuits. He studied political science and sociology at the University of Manitoba for a year, leaving to become a jail guard at the Vaughan Street Detention Centre. He later became deputy superintendent of the Manitoba Youth Centre. He served as president of the then Manitoba Government Employees' Association from 1979 until 1986.

On the job experiences of dealing with a hostage taking and being attacked with a baseball bat, while not perfectly analogous to union and provincial politics, no doubt left him with some useful insights for what lay ahead.

He was first elected to the legislature on March 18, 1986 as NDP MLA for the north Winnipeg riding of Concordia. On April 17, 1986, he was appointed minister of urban affairs in the Pawley government.
On March 30, 1988, Doer was elected leader of the Manitoba NDP in the middle of a provincial election campaign, following the defeat of Premier Howard Pawley’s government in the legislature, but declined to be sworn in as premier.

From there he led what was the third party in the political wilderness of the Manitoba legislature, with just 12 of 57 seats, until the Sept. 11, 1990 election and he became leader of the official opposition with 20 seats in the legislature.

Doer’s is an interesting political biography. A couple of years in power in cabinet from 1986 to 1988, followed by 11 years on the opposition benches from 1988 to 1999, culminating with another decade as premier from 1999 to 2009.

The political shorthand on Doer is he was a good union guy, but business has lived surprisingly well with his tenure as premier because he’s a pragmatist who has governed from the centre during mainly good economic times and has been the prisoner of no ideology.

Doer is the consummate let’s-go-for-a-beer-at-the-barbecue guy. It’s the kind of thing Thompson Mayor Tim Johnston, who might be described in similar terms himself, admires about Doer, even though Johnston ran as a Liberal in the April 1995 provincial election against incumbent Thompson NDP MLA Steve Ashton, who trounced him with the future mayor finishing a distant third.

“I was always impressed with him (Doer),” Johnston said last week, “the way he treats people.”

Johnston said Doer always had the right mix of formality and politeness, along with a more relaxed informality. “He’d always greet me as ‘Your Worship,” out of respect,” Johnston said, but then it was, “Tim, how are you? He knew people, he remembered names. He talked to people and listened. He may not have been an expert on every file but he made sure his aides got him up to speed on what he needed to know and when he needed to know it,” Johnston said, adding Doer wasn’t a politician who hogged the limelight and was willing to share credit where credit was due with federal and municipal politicians, a quality, Johnson said, which he hasn’t found to be universal among his fellow politicians.

Doer didn’t spend a lot of time in the North as premier. He visited Thompson 10 times in 10 years – an average of once a year, although sometimes two and three years went by between visits, according to records released to the Thompson Citizen last May by Jonathan Hildebrand director of cabinet communications.

We asked because local lawyer and NDP supporter Bob Mayer claimed in a letter to the editor, which we declined to publish, that Doer made “frequent visits to our community.” Well, clearly, no, Bob, he did not.

But Mayer was right on another point, which is perhaps why it seemed the premier was here more often than he was. “Surely, you would have noticed how many Thompson residents the premier greeted by their first name as he walked from the vehicle to the Norseman site” April 16, Mayer asked? We did indeed.

Doer’s legacy in Northern Manitoba, when it comes to fruition, will an infrastructure one: Wuskwatim Generating Station, along with a new University College of the North (UCN) campus for Thompson, as well as the Canadian Environmental Test Research and Education Center (CanETREC) and Global Aerospace Centre for Icing and Environmental Research Inc. (GlacIer), which occasioned two of his three most recent visits here in 2007 and 2009.