If you had to boil Manitoba Liberal Party leader Dougald Lamont’s platform down to two words, they would likely be “increased investment”. Lamont brought his party’s ideas to a stop in Flin Flon on Feb. 13, part of a short tour of northern Manitoba.
Lamont made several detours during his time in the community, including discussions with the Flin Flon and District Chamber of Commerce and Mayor Cal Huntley, as well as a morning reading session with early years students at Ruth Betts Community School.
Since taking office after the 2016 provincial election, Lamont has visited Flin Flon twice, making his first appearance last year for a community meeting on health care. The Liberal party currently occupies a distant third spot in the provincial legislature behind the ruling Progressive Conservative (PC) party and the Manitoba NDP, but Lamont felt his party’s platform was independent of both sides.
“We think it’s our responsibility to try and govern for everybody, not just to say we can win in Winnipeg and we don’t have to worry about anywhere else. That’s not good enough for me and I don’t think that’s good enough for you. We have an obligation to make sure people have access to health care, to education and that we’re investing in communities so they’re growing. That’s our vision,” he said.
Lamont brought up a number of key proposals for his party, including the creation of a provincial business development bank, similar to ATB in Alberta. He said the main goal of such a bank would be to help get entrepreneurs up and running in Manitoba.
“Its main thing would be investing in Manitoba businesses. It would either provide loans or possibly buy shares in the company as equity so you would still get money and have capital, but you wouldn’t have to worry about meeting those payments and interest building month after month,” Lamont said.
“If your business works out and takes off, the bank makes money. If it doesn’t, the bank loses a little money, but that’s the way business is.
“In Manitoba, there are people who have everything it takes to be successful as a business. They have the idea; they’ve got plans, the people and the skills, but they can’t get investment. That’s what’s missing and that’s where we want to step in and create a Manitoba business development bank.”
Other pledges include reducing the number of children in care, an upcoming climate plan that Lamont pledged would encourage economic growth, securing the future of Manitoba Hydro and what Lamont termed a provincial “New Deal” on infrastructure.
Considering the uncertainty surrounding industry in northern Manitoba, Lamont thinks there is still room for growth outside of Manitoba’s cities.
“I think there’s lots of potential. Some of it is potential for further mining. There’s still lots of ore left untouched. There is potential for investment in new businesses, as well as for tourism, but it needs to be developed,” he said.
“Our main goal is growth, but that also means recognizing there is value across the province. To me, it doesn’t matter how people voted in the past, whether they voted PC or NDP in the past, we think people deserve to succeed.”
Lamont sees some actions by the current PC government as centralizing services in order to reduce costs: a strategy he doesn’t think is guaranteed to work.
“These are decisions being made on the idea that if you centralize everything, then it will be cheaper. That doesn’t always work and it doesn’t make things cheaper. You just end up with everything being the same, which doesn’t work in a province that’s large and diverse, but it also ends up with it not saving any money,” he said.
“Governments should be effective and efficient about the way they spend money, but there’s a difference between being cheap and being efficient. If you want a cheap system, that’s not going to work either. Our focus should be on providing good health care, good education and having good infrastructure, and we don’t have those three things, quite honestly.”
