About that premier of ours ...

Whomever is chosen to lead the Keystone Province's Dippers and thus become Manitoba's new premier, he or she is likely to be as friendly to big business as Premier Gary Doer has been in the last 10 years.
How friendly is that? Take it away, Cy Gonick:
"The high place accorded business can be illustrated by an incident occurring early on in Doer’s first mandate. In 1972 under Ed Schreyer, the provincial government created the Manitoba Hog Producers Marketing Board with single-desk selling powers. Any packer who wanted to purchase hogs had to buy from that single-desk seller. This collective-bargaining power had been a long-standing demand of hog producers. To entice Maple Leaf Foods to build a hundred-million-dollar hog-packing plant in the province, Gary Filmon’s Conservative government terminated single-desk selling back in 1996. In opposition, the NDP had promised to restore it, so farmers were optimistic that an injustice would soon be reversed when the NDP returned to office in 1999. When asked by a Winnipeg Free Press reporter about it, however, the premier said it would never be restored because he had promised Maple Leaf Foods president Michael McCain that there would be no return to single-desk marketing in Manitoba.
"A second incident in its first mandate further confirms that this government would not introduce reforms that did not have the blessing of Manitoba business. Under pressure from Manitoba’s labour movement to reverse some restrictive legislation introduced by the previous Tory administration, the government brought in some amendments to the Labour Relations Act. Mild as they were, they caused the business community to fume, extracting from Doer a pledge to consult with it and seek consensus on all matters that might impact on business.
"This promise Doer has kept, including the modest changes introduced to the Employment Standards Act and tepid increases to the minimum wage. As one NDP insider I spoke with in preparing this article told me, Doer has managed to 'disarm' the business community. ..."