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SILVERA4 | NEWS O THEGLOBEANDMAIL | WEDNESDAY,SEPTEMBER11,
Brian Pallister’s Progressive Con-
servatives have won re-election
in Manitoba in a victory that so-
lidifies a bloc of conservative pre-
miers who have lined up against
the Trudeaugovernment ahead
of a federal campaign.
With 72 per cent of polls re-
porting, the PCs were projected to
win a majoritygovernment, lead-
ing in 35 ridings and with roughly
50 per cent of the popular vote.
The NDP were ahead in 19 ridings
and the Liberals led in three.
Cheers rose through a rapidly
growing crowd at PC headquar-
ters on Tuesday night as the party
painted most of Manitoba Tory
blue, winning a majority of the
province’s seats outside of Winni-
peg. Within the capital city, a
number of tight three-way battles
were being fought among the To-
ries, New Democrats and Liber-
als.
While the PCs were projected
to lose a handful of seats in the
legislature, Mr. Pallister’s gamble
to call the election one year earli-
er than prescribed under the
province’s fixed-date election law
looked set to return his party to
power with another of the largest
government caucuses in decades.
The PCs had 38 seats before dis-
solution, while the NDP had 12
and the Liberals four. There were
three Independents
The PCs won Tuesday’s elec-
tion after a campaign in which
Mr. Pallister pledged to relax the
tight control he has exercised on
the provincial budget since being
elected Premier in 2016. The run-
ner-up New Democrats, led by
Wab Kinew, promised to undo
cuts made to Winnipeg-area
health-care centres by the Pro-
gressive Conservatives.
Mr. Pallister is among several
conservative premiers, along
with Alberta’s Jason Kenney, Sas-
katchewan’s Scott Moe and Onta-
rio’s Doug Ford, who have been
waging political and legal battles
against the federal carbon tax
that took effect this year. While
Mr. Pallister has not been as vocal
as some of his conservative col-
leagues, his government
launched its own legal challenge
of the federal policy and he used
the issue during the campaign to
set himself apart from Mr. Kinew.
Mr. Pallister had once planned
to introduce his own carbon tax.
But he scrapped those plans last
year and instead joined a coali-
tion of premiers who opposed
the federal tax. He now argues
that Ottawa should recognize
Manitoba’s investments in hydro-
electric power instead of a tax.
The federal government has re-
jected that argument.
While Ontario, Saskatchewan
and Alberta have launched con-
stitutional challenges that are set
to head to the Supreme Court of
Canada, Manitoba has taken a
more narrow legal approach. The
province filed a lawsuit in Federal
Court that objects to the tax and
how it is applied in the province.
Mr. Pallister’s central message
during the campaign was a prom-
ise to balance the province’s bud-
get over the next four years while
still cutting a slew of taxes and al-
lowing more spending on health
and education. The win solidifiesthe Progressive Conservative Par-
ty’s hold on a province that had
been ruled by NDP governments
for 17 years before Mr. Pallister en-
tered the premier’s office three
years ago.
The New Democrats focused
on calls to invest more money in
health care, including reopening
emergency rooms closed by the
PCs, while increasing the mini-
mum wage to $15 an hour and
hiking taxes on those making
more than $250,000 a year.
Most opinion polls showed Mr.
Pallister’s party entering the cam-
paign far ahead of its opponents.
In 2016, Mr. Pallister won the
largest majoritygovernment in
Manitoba in more than a century.
The PCs secured 40 of the prov-
ince’s 57 seats with more than
half the popular vote.
The Tory Leader ran a safe
campaign according to Paul Tho-
mas, a political-science professor
emeritus at the University of Ma-
nitoba. Mr. Pallister avoided regu-
lar appearances with reporters
and kept his promises small after
three years of nearly daily warn-ings about the need for austerity.
“I’ve watched a lot of elections
here and I can’t recall ever being
so bored by an election,” said
Scott MacKay, the president of
Winnipeg-based polling firm
Probe Research. He said most Ma-
nitobans only began showing in-
terest in the campaign last week
as they returned to work and
school.
“If the turnout is really low,
less than 50 per cent, then that
will be the punctuation mark on
this thing,” he said. “This cam-
paign died with a whimper.”
The campaign was marked by
a barrage of mudslinging be-
tween the two main parties. The
Progressive Conservatives ran
ads attacking Mr. Kinew for his
past criminal convictions, for
which the record was suspended,
and an accusation of assault from
a former girlfriend, which he has
denied. The ads also publicized
offensive lyrics from Mr. Kinew’s
rapping career.
“They’ve tried to draw a com-
parison between this responsible
citizen in Mr. Pallister and this an-gry, Indigenous man in Mr. Kinew
who they say has this violent
past,” Mr. Thomas said. “They’ve
tried to leave the impression
these events were recent.”
Mr. Kinew acknowledged a
“difficult period” in his life and
apologized in a book published
before he was elected to lead the
NDP in 2017. He has said the in-
cidents, which happened more
than a decade ago, don’t reflect
who he is today.
The New Democrats respon-
ded with ads in which people crit-
icized Mr. Pallister’s decision to
cut health-care services. The ads
seemed ready to insult the Pro-
gressive Conservative Leader,
just as the sound cut out.
Mr. Pallister’s popularity has
trailed that of his party. He is seen
as aloof and cold, according to
Mr. Thomas. A number of gaffes
and criticisms from his time in of-
fice, including his decision to
take long vacations annually to
his home in Costa Rica, where he
does not access hisgovernment
e-mail, did not help to endear
him to the electorate.Pallister’sTorieswinreducedmajorityinManitoba
PCssecuresecondterm
afterpromising
increasedhealth,
educationspending
JUSTINGIOVANNETTI
WINNIPEG
BrianPallister,shownwithhiswifeEstherandsupporterslastmonth,ledhisProgressiveConservativestore-electiononTuesdaynight.Hecalledthe
electionayearearlierthanprescribedunderManitobalaw.JOHNWOODS/THECANADIANPRESSFederal Public Safety Minister
Ralph Goodale says he’s heard
from residents in the Maritimes
livid about losing cellphone ser-
vice after post-tropical storm
Dorian swept through the re-
gion, causing widespread power
outages and property damage.
Speaking on Tuesday from a
slightly damaged government
wharf in Herring Cove, N.S., Mr.
Goodale pledged financial sup-
port through disaster-assistance
programs, but he also made a
point of urging fed-up cellphone
users to take action, saying he’s
heard about their frustration
“loud and clear.”
“For those who have been af-
fected by what they consider to
be faulty or deficient telephone
services, they ... should make
their concerns known to the ...
regulatory authority,” Mr. Good-
ale said, referring to the Cana-
dian Radio-television and Tele-
communications Commission.
“They need to know if customers
believe the response to the
emergency was not at the level
they have a right to expect. ...
Make sure you make that con-
cern known to the CRTC.”
Mr. Goodale said cellphones
have become essential tools for
Canadians.
“It’s not just a frill that’s nice
to have,” he said, adding that in-
frastructure across the country
must be built to withstand the
intense weather and “abnormal
circumstances” caused by cli-
mate change.
Many Nova Scotia residents
have come forward to complain
about spotty cell service in the
aftermath of the storm, with
some saying they were left with
no way to call for help or seek
critical information.
Various wireless providershave confirmed they dispatched
crews to repair damaged cell
towers, but company officials
have also reminded users that
most cellphone towers have lim-
ited backup electricity, leaving
them vulnerable to failure dur-
ing extended power outages.
Telus issued a statement that
it has been working around the
clock with its infrastructure part-
ner to restore service to its cus-
tomers and won’t charge people
for some fees owing to the storm.
Dorian pulled down power
lines across the region. In Nova
Scotia, outages were reported
from one end of the province to
the other, leaving more than
400,000 Nova Scotia Power cus-
tomers – 80 per cent of the
homes and businesses in the
province – in the dark at the
height of the storm.
If nothing else,the waveof
complaints confirms how reliant
people have become on theirsmartphones and fibre-optic
telecommunications gear that
can also fail when the lights go
out and backup batteries die.
Mr. Goodale, federal Defence
Minister Harjit Sajjan and federal
Rural Economic Development
Minister Bernadette Jordan later
headed to Herring Cove, a tiny
coastal community south of Ha-
lifax close to where Dorian made
landfall on Saturday night.
As the storm approached the
coastline, it lashed the area with
driving rain and gusts reaching
almost 150 kilometres an hour –
approaching the power of a Cate-
gory 2 hurricane.
There were no reports of in-
juries, but roofs were torn off
and trees were snapped like
twigs, pulling down power lines
across a wide swath of the Mar-
itimes.
At one point, more than
500,000 electricity consumers in
the region were without power,including 75 per cent in Prince
Edward Island and 20 per cent in
New Brunswick.
As Day 3 of the recovery effort
drew to a close, about 16,
customers were waiting for re-
connection in PEI, and about
1,000 in New Brunswick. Howev-
er, more than 88,000 Nova Scotia
Power customers were still with-
out electricity on Tuesday eve-
ning, and the company said it
would be Thursday before every-
one was reconnected.
The company said it has
found about 3,700 trees on pow-
er lines that stretch across 32,
kilometres, and repairs are being
made to 300 broken or leaning
utility poles. As well, about 4,
outages across Nova Scotia rep-
resent individual customers,
which means one repair will
bring electricity back to only one
customer.THE CANADIAN PRESSGoodaleurgesMaritimerstotellCRTCaboutcell-servicefailuresafterDorian
MICHAELMacDONALDHALIFAX
Russian spies stole embarrassing
documents from Democratic Par-
ty officials and released them
through WikiLeaks, while an ar-
my of trolls in St. Petersburg
spread pro-Trump propaganda
on Facebook.
But after U.S. intelligence offi-
cials revealed Mr. Putin’s role in
late 2016, the mole’s handlers
feared he would soon be found
out by the Russians, the Times
said. So they planned an oper-
ation to get him out of the coun-
try. At first, the source was reluc-
tant to leave, the paper reported,
but he ultimately agreed in the
spring of 2017.
CNN reported that U.S. officials
wanted to pull the mole at least
in part because Mr. Trump shared
classified Israeli intelligence with
Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak,
Russian Foreign Minister and
then-U.S. ambassador, at an Oval
Office meeting in May, 2017. The
CIA denied this detail of the story.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov confirmed Tuesday that
Mr. Smolenkov had worked for
Mr. Putin’s government, but
played down his importance. Mr.
Peskov said Mr. Smolenkov did
not have access to Mr. Putin and
was fired in 2016 or 2017. “It istrue, Smolenkov used to work in
the presidential administration,
but a few years ago he was dis-
missed through an internal in-
struction,” Mr. Peskov told report-
ers.
Property records in the name
of Mr. Smolenkov and his wife
showed that the couple bought a
six-bedroom house last year in an
exurban area of Virginia, near the
U.S. capital.
Democratic Congressman Bill
Pascrell called for an investiga-
tion to determine whether Mr.
Trump’s sharing of classified in-
formation with Russians prompt-
ed the decision to pull the mole
out.
Mark Simakovsky, a former
U.S. Defence and State Depart-
ment official who worked on the
Russia file, said it is an “excep-
tional case” for American intelli-
gence to have had a source in the
office of a foreign leader.
“To have seen a source rise to
that level would have been in-
credibly valuable – almost in thecrown jewels of Russia-focused
intelligence,” Mr. Simakovsky,
now a fellow at the Atlantic
Council think tank, said in an in-
terview. “His exfiltration would
have been one of the most da-
maging blows to U.S. intelligence
efforts in Russia in years, if not
decades. It will undoubtedly hin-
der the CIA’s efforts to under-
stand Russian action and inten-
tions in the upcoming election.”
Secretary of State Mike Pom-
peo warned Tuesday that report-
ing on the story was dangerous.
“The reporting is so egregious as
to create enormous risk to the
United States of America,” he said
at a White House briefing, with-
out specifying what about the
story was incorrect.
In the world of spy-vs.-spy, the
sort of extraction that reportedly
spirited the CIA’s source to the
U.S. is considered a crowning
achievement.
One example was Canada’s
rescue of Russian double agent
Yevgeni Brik in 1992. Mr. Brik hadsecretly fed information to Cana-
dian officials for several years in
the 1950s when he was posted to
Ottawa. But he was found out by
his Soviet superiors and disap-
peared into the gulag system.
When the Canadian govern-
ment re-established contact with
Mr. Brik decades later, they craft-
ed a secret plan to assign him a
fake identity and convey him out
of Russia. The operation was a
success and Mr. Brik spent the
rest of his life in Canada.
“He had been promised that
Canada would accept him back
when he left for Russia 40 years
earlier. This operation was to
honour that promise,” said Do-
nald Mahar, a former Canadian
Security Intelligence Service
counterintelligence officer who
helped find Mr. Brik and accom-
panied him during his escape.
“These operations are very ex-
pensive and require strict atten-
tion to detail. ... Failure could
lead to imprisonment, or even
death.”Spy:CongressmancallsforprobeintowhetherTrump’sactionspromptedremoval
FROMA