Manitoba’s 43rd provincial election will officially get underway in the week ahead and when it concludes on Oct. 3, voters will have made history no matter if the incumbent Progressive Conservatives win or the opposition New Democrats sweep to power.
If the PCs prevail, Heather Stefanson will have become the first woman in the province’s history to lead her party to victory in a general election. She is already the province’s first female premier, having notched that accomplishment when she won her party’s leadership after Brian Pallister resigned in 2021.
If the New Democrats form government, its leader, Wab Kinew, will become the first provincial premier in the country’s history who is a First Nations person. (The country’s territories have had Indigenous premiers and Manitoba has had one Métis premier, John Norquay.)
This is Kinew’s second election as leader of his party and until the beginning of the summer, it looked like Manitobans would indeed make Kinew the next premier. But the only two public polls taken since the end of May show that Stefanson’s PCs have closed whatever gap existed.
But this is not a two-party race. Far from it.
Both the Manitoba Liberals and the Manitoba Greens have had decent showings in the last two elections and the decisions this year to be made by previous supporters of those two parties — the Liberals in particular — could be decisive.
In 2019, more than 69,000 voted for a Manitoba Liberal candidate — about 14 per cent of the popular vote province-wide but nearly 19 per cent of the vote in Winnipeg. Just under 30,000 Manitobans voted Green, representing 6.4 per cent province-wide and 7.3 per cent in the capital.
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Four years ago, the NDP fought the PCs to a near draw in Winnipeg’s 32 seats with the PCs taking 15 districts on 36.5 per cent of the popular vote in the capital to the NDP’s 14 seats on 36 per cent of the vote. The Liberals wound up with three seats in the capital.
Given the NDP strength in northern Manitoba ridings (NDP hold four of four) and PC dominance everywhere outside of Winnipeg (PCs hold 21 of 21), the ball game is — as it is in most Manitoba elections — all about Winnipeg.
Those last two elections though were widely perceived as inevitable wins for the PCs. Pallister’s PCs were heavy favourites going into each campaign and won majorities both times. That kind of election dynamic, though, can “free” voters who do not want to vote for the favourite and want to object to that front-runner in different ways by voting, in previous years, for third and fourth parties which have no chance of forming government.
The dynamic in the campaign about to unfold is different. The NDP is clearly in a position to knock off the PCs just as the PCs appear to have a fighting chance to hold government. It will be a close race. So if those 100,000 voters — again, most in Winnipeg — who went Liberal or Green in 2019 decide this year that they want to vote for a change of government rather than to register a protest of the incumbent government, they will swing to the NDP.
And it may not take many of them. Consider the riding of McPhillips, which includes a couple of northern Winnipeg neighbourhoods as well as the rural municipality of West St. Paul. McPhillips was the closest race in the province four years ago with PC Shannon Martin beating the New Democrat by just 88 votes. But the Liberal candidate got more than 1,500 votes; the Green more than 400 votes.
This year, Martin, the Progressive Conservative, is not running. Sheilagh Restall will carry the PC banner. JD Devgan will run for the New Democrats. Devgan’s easiest path to victory is to hold on to the NDP support from 2019 and then convince just a few hundred of the combined 1,900 Liberal or Green voters from four years ago to come his way and overcome that 88-vote NDP deficit.
The math is similar for New Democrats looking to upend PC candidates in plenty of other Winnipeg ridings: Southdale, Rossmere, Assiniboia, Radisson, Riel and Seine River. Waverley, Kirkfield Park, and Kildonan-River East could also be in play.. To win government, the NDP will need some pickups outside Winnipeg and, sure enough, in Brandon East, Dauphin and Selkirk, 2019 Liberal and Green voters swinging to the Kinew NDP could overpower local PC campaigns. In all of those ridings, the combined NDP, Liberal and Green vote in 2019 could be close to overtaking the PC vote.
Even in the Winnipeg riding of Tuxedo — the Tory stronghold Stefanson has held since 2000 after taking over from former premier Gary Filmon who had it for the 20 years before that — the combined NDP-Liberal-Green vote in 2019 would have been enough for a win.
Federally, we have often seen Liberals in a tight race successfully squeeze soft NDP voters with scary warnings of a prospective Conservative government if they don’t vote for the red team. Manitoba in 2023 offers an interesting reversal: it will be New Democrats who will be appealing to Liberals and Greens to unite under their orange progressive banner to prevent the election of a conservative government none of them want.
David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to note that, should Wab Kinew win, he will be the country’s first premier who is a First Nations person, not the country’s first Indigenous premier.
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