New leader Khan faces tough task to heal PC party’s deep divide

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2025 (190 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba leadership campaign, Obby Khan repeatedly pledged to build a “big tent” of support. Now that Khan has won the leadership, it’s pretty clear the tent he inherited has two distinct rooms.

Under new rules instituted by the party to stop leadership candidates from flooding the vote with new members, Khan won more points but received 53 fewer votes than challenger Wally Daudrich.

More points but fewer votes means Khan’s victory will forever have an asterisk attached to it, a reminder that the tension between the urban and rural factions of the party are deeper and more stubborn than ever before.

Think about the result for a moment.

Khan is the PC party’s Winnipeg talisman, one of only two Tories who retained their seats against the NDP’s orange wave in the fall of 2023. He’s a charismatic politician with a solid, pre-politics profile as a professional football player and proven retail political skills.

Daudrich, on the other hand, was a hot mess of a leadership candidate, a gregarious and energetic political neophyte who espoused just about all of the far-right policy positions that helped steer the party into an iceberg in the last election.

The Churchill businessman is anti-abortion and opposes the provision of free birth control. He has a history of disparaging the LGBTTQ+ community. He advocated for the deportation of anyone who protests Israel’s war against Hamas. He has called public schools “an indoctrination system.”

Even while facing a candidate spouting American-style rhetoric, Khan could not produce a convincing victory over Daudrich. Regardless of how the new point system performed, Tories should be alarmed about what this result means for the next election.

To have any hope of unseating Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP, the Tories have to become more competitive in Winnipeg, where most seats in the Manitoba legislature are located. And the PC party cannot do that unless it embraces a more practical, small ‘c’ conservative brand that steers clear of noxious, populist, right-wing ideology that is running rampant south of the border.

Thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state, many of the core issues of his MAGA movement have become toxic in Canada. For the moment, many genuinely conservative Canadians are conflicted about far-right political populism and are looking for something less toxic, more nuanced.

The PC party knows about the risks of going too far to the right, too quickly, more than just about any other political party in this country.

In the 2023 election, the Tories ran campaign ads celebrating the fact they had refused to fund a search of the Prairie Green Landfill for the remains of Indigenous women murdered by a serial killer. This, desperate Tories asserted, was a sign of strong leadership.

The Tories also ran ads claiming to be the party of “parental rights,” adopting a term used by far-right, anti-LGBTTQ+ social conservative activists in Canada and the U.S.

The strategy for adopting those positions, as explained post-election by campaign manager Marni Larkin, was to fend off a potential electoral annihilation by shoring up rural seats with far-right positions and language. Larkin told the Free Press there were concerns the Tories might only win 12 seats; by refusing the landfill search and waving the parental rights banner, the party was able to retain 22 seats — but only two in Winnipeg.

“With over 20 seats now, we will be able to raise money,” Larkin said in 2023. “We will have a full, robust leadership race. And in four years, when the next election comes around, who knows?”

Given the backlash against Trump, we pretty much do know how things will go in the next election. Despite that, the leadership results suggest this is a party afflicted by an active civil war.

Khan has promised to be a unifying force, and there is a possibility he can fulfil that goal. However, if he has any hope of building that big tent, he’ll have to start by telling Manitobans more about what he stands for. And that includes a full explanation of his role in the pernicious parental rights plank in the 2023 election.

Khan was, literally and figuratively, the poster boy for those ads. Since the 2023 defeat, Khan has refused multiple requests for longer interviews to explain his role in those ads and his thoughts about the issues with which they are associated.

As leader, Khan can no longer engage in vague language about the previous election campaign. Both of the rooms in his tent deserve nothing less.

Disenchanted conservatives in Winnipeg must know if this is a party that will end its flirtation with far-right ideals. And rural Tories deserve to know if Khan is still willing to carve out room for social conservative policies like parental rights.

The good news is that, at the leadership convention, Khan acknowledged his party is divided. He promised he would build a “bridge” between factions of the party.

However, until he tells people exactly what he stands for and where he wants to take the party, he’ll be stuck building a bridge to nowhere.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca