Thompson NDP MLA Steve Ashton rolled the dice in his bid to become premier and they came up snake eyes. The biggest gamble of his political career was for naught.
Still, no one should be surprised either that Ashton ran or that he lost. At 53 years of age, with 28 years in the legislature, making him Manitoba's longest-serving MLA, it was now or never for Ashton to reach for the proverbial brass ring by trying to become the first Northern premier in the 97 years that Northern Manitoba has been part of the province. There wasn't going to be a magical political tomorrow representing some better time to try and scoop up the premier's prize.
One never wants to say never in Canadian politics - a business that has produced more than its share of unexpected second acts (i.e. former federal Liberal prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien spring easily to mind as recent historical examples) - but if ever there was a safe bet, wagering on Steve Ashton never becoming premier of this province now is it.
That may be a bitter pill for Thompsonites to accept because it is sometimes hard to see your man, the hometown boy, as others elsewhere see him.
That Ashton has a lock on the local political establishment, for whatever that is worth, is indisputable. A year ago, both the president and manager of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce were card-carrying NDP members, supporting both Ashtons (last October, their energies were spent helping Niki Ashton, Steve's daughter, in her victory for the NDP in the federal Churchill riding).
How many other places in Canada can the NDP boast they have key representatives of the local chamber of commerce on board as party members? Sure, former NDP premier Gary Doer was famous for getting along well with the Winnipeg business community, largely positing pragmatism over ideology, but what goes on in Thompson is of a rather different order again. The Thompson Chamber of Commerce NDP membership affiliations - even a single one - would be considered remarkable in much of the country. Here, it's just considered good business. Thompson really is a different world. Which may explain why we had Mayor Tim Johnston, who unsuccessfully ran against Steve Ashton under the Liberal banner in the 1995 provincial election, dutifully at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 244 last Saturday to vote for Ashton, his orange NDP delegate badge draped around his neck.
One of the refrains heard last weekend, if we can paraphrase only slightly, is that if the rest of the province "knew Steve like we know him," he would have won the premier's job. Balderdash. Again, this is both magical and insular thinking. Did anyone in Thompson happen to notice that unlike his rivals, Andrew Swan, for a time, and Premier Greg Selinger, none of Ashton's cabinet colleagues - some who had sat around the cabinet table with him for a decade - supported his bid to become premier?
Only two backbench NDP MLAs, Daryl Reid and Bidhu Jha, supported Ashton from within the government. Are we to believe his NDP cabinet and government colleagues somehow don't know the real Steve Ashton, but we here in Thompson do?
The real Steve Ashton, as demonstrated time and again over the course of the six-week leadership campaign, is a take-no-prisoners, bare-knuckled, hardball politician, who will easily out-hustle and outwork his opponents. Farther left on the political spectrum and far more ideological than either of his opponents, Ashton accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of running convincingly as the lone-wolf outsider - the anti-establishment left-leaning candidate, who to a considerable degree set himself against the internal power structure of NDP party politics. He walked the picket line with striking Manitoba Hydro workers. Ashton's campaign out-hustled his rivals in signing up thousands of new party members, many of them relatively new immigrants from various ethnic communities - over 700 new members in a single day in September that ended with the applications being delivered to his home by volunteers at 1:30 a.m.
Also to his credit, Ashton was clear on his issues. No one can says he waffled on where he stood. In mid-September, at the University of Manitoba, where he was student union president in 1977, he announced if he became premier that he would reinstate the post-secondary education tuition freeze the government lifted after a decade earlier this year.
One of the NDP's main campaign promises in 1999 was to roll back tuition fees 10 per cent then freeze them, which they did until this year's budget when the cabinet, in which Ashton served, made the decision to scrap the freeze in late March, although Ashton supported the tuition freeze at the provincial NDP convention in Brandon earlier in March.
Ashton also promised that if he became premier, he would bring in anti-scab legislation to ban the use of replacement workers during strikes, something the NDP has talked about but never made law in Manitoba.
In the end, Ashton's hardworking and hard-fought campaign wasn't enough - not nearly enough - to beat Selinger, the odds-on-favourite to replace Doer, now Canada's ambassador to the United States.
Selinger, 58, 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. Ashton lost decisively and it had nothing to do with delegates not knowing the "real Steve" and everything to with realpolitik, a game Ashton and Selinger, despite their differences, long ago both mastered.
