A house divided

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This article was published 08/03/2015 (4043 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So what exactly was the point of all that again?

For the past six months, Manitoba’s provincial government has been paralyzed as the governing NDP has gone through the self-inflicted trial of a leadership battle. And after all the resignations and recriminations, the party is now right back where it was before this all started — with Greg Selinger still the premier and leading the party into the next election.

After the events of the past few months, it is hard to imagine how the NDP can come together, let alone come back to win the next election. The divisive three-way race between Selinger, Theresa Oswald and Steve Ashton laid bare the long-unseen rift between different factions in the party. Although the defeated candidates said all the right things about unity and coming together after the result, the reality is that the provincial NDP has been, and will continue to be, a house divided.

Although the result of this process turned out to be the status quo, what we have experienced these past six months is remarkable and without precedent in provincial and Canadian politics.

First, Selinger is unique among premiers in that he actually campaigned for his job in the first place. Nearly every other premier serving in recent times who has faced the deadly combination of low public popularity and internal dissent has read the writing on the wall and resigned.

B.C.’s Gordon Campbell, Alberta’s Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford, Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty and Newfoundland and Labrador’s Kathy Dunderdale all fell on their swords for the good of their parties and their governments. All of these premiers resigned once their personal popularity with the electorate dipped into the 30 per cent range. The last measure of Selinger’s popularity conducted by Probe Research in December showed that only 28 per cent of Manitobans approved of his leadership.

While a premier could survive a mid-term swoon in his polling numbers, it is completely without precedent for a party leader to survive the degree of internal dissent that Selinger has weathered during the past year.

The process that unfolded this weekend at the Manitoba NDP’s annual convention was highly unique among provincial political parties, as it was not a leadership convention per se. At most regular party gatherings, delegates do not have the choice of voting for someone other than leader. Instead, they have to simply vote (via secret ballot) whether the current party leader should remain on the job, or not. If the leader does not get a high enough threshold of support, he or she typically resigns, and then a leadership convention is called.

For most political leaders, a razor-thin victory of 50 per cent-plus-one is not enough to survive. To put it in context, in November 2005 Progressive Conservative party leader Stuart Murray resigned after only receiving the support of 55 per cent of the delegates to that party’s annual convention. More famously, former federal PC leader Joe Clark triggered a leadership race when just 66.5 per cent of party members confirmed his leadership in 1981.

Selinger’s narrow 33-vote win on the second ballot was about as narrow and as pyrrhic as victories can possibly be. While Selinger and his caucus supporters were grinning ear to ear on stage yesterday, the ones who were probably beaming the most were the Brian Pallister-led Progressive Conservatives and Rana Bokhari-led Liberals. With the NDP 22 points behind the PCs in the last Probe Research Inc. poll, the Tories will be particularly confident about their chances in the next election. While anything can happen between now and Election Day, they will be feeling especially self-assured about facing a battered premier who will be busy looking over his shoulder for a long time to come, rather than having to face a wild card in Ashton or Oswald.

These two candidates, in particular, will be ones to watch in the days ahead. While they stood off to the side of the stage, stifling their disappointment in the name of party unity, many of their supporters will have a tougher time accepting the result.

There is no clear indication yet when or how Oswald and the other five MLAs who broke ranks will return to caucus, let alone the cabinet table. The many political staff who took leaves from their day jobs at the Legislature and who worked on Oswald’s campaign will be wondering about their futures, and whether the premier and his supporters will be in a forgiving or vengeful mood. And the key supporters who wanted to see a change in their party’s leadership may not be inclined to donate money, knock on doors and pound signs into the ground in the next election.

In one sense, the Manitoba NDP are back to square one, exactly where they were six months ago. But there can be no going back to the way things were after this surreal and bruising process. The most interesting questions in this long, drawn-out soap opera on Broadway still remain to be answered in the time between now and April 2016.

Curtis Brown is the vice-president of ProbeResearch Inc., a Winnipeg-based market research firm. His views are his own.

curtis@probe-research.com

Twitter: @curtisatprobe