Spruce Woods byelection leaves Tories struggling

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This article was published 30/08/2025 (209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a bait-and-switch byelection this week. Premier Wab Kinew offered the bait but in the end, Spruce Woods refused to switch.

The NDP pulled out all the stops to pull out an upset win in the seventh-safest Progressive Conservative seat in the province. Despite promising over $300 million in orange spending bait to planting more Team Wab Kinew signs than even his own candidate had, Manitoba’s preternaturally popular premier wasn’t quite able to seal the deal.

This reliably blue riding in the heart of reliably blue rural Manitoba was nudged but didn’t quite budge. When the results came in, the “yellow dog” had nipped the premier back instead.

What to make of all this? Ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy, practised hepatoscopy, the reading of entrails, to divine the future. In today’s politics, we read the past for clues about what lies ahead.

There have been 11 byelections since the 2011 election. Only two switched parties — Tuxedo in 2024 and St. Boniface in 2018. Uniquely, both changed hands after two defeated party leaders stepped down, Heather Stefanson and Greg Selinger. Every other one stayed loyal.

On the surface, not much to read here. But a closer look at PC byelection performance reveals a disquieting trend. Of the six byelections held during Stefanson and Khan’s time as leader, the party lost one safe seat (Tuxedo), barely held on to another (Spruce Woods), and prevailed by the slimmest of margins in two others (Fort Whyte and Kirkfield Park). If byelections are barometers of dissatisfaction for the incumbent party, then the PCs need to be worried.

What about turnout? Conventional wisdom is that people don’t come out to vote in byelections. This is true without being accurate. The Spruce Woods turnout of 41 per cent was higher than the average turnout for all those other byelections going back more than a decade. And when overall turnout in the last provincial election was only 55 per cent, Spruce Woods looks quite respectable. In other words, this PC near-loss cannot be dismissed as a fluke.

“A win is a win,” claimed PC Leader Obby Khan on election night. A “near upset,” Kinew replied the next day. Both are right to claim their versions of victory.

The truth is that Kinew had everything to gain and nothing to lose from going all out in Spruce Woods. For Khan, it was the opposite, nothing to gain from keeping the seat and everything to lose if it went orange.

An NDP win would have been a legitimate upset presaging a larger political earthquake to come. With a stronger local candidate, he might well have done it. A less controversial PC candidate might have done better. But this result serves Kinew almost as well. In the next election, spooked Tories will now be playing defence to protect seats they already hold with scare resources they can barely raise, instead of playing offence to win seats back from the NDP.

Campaigns live or die on identifying, resourcing, and winning target seats. The NDP’s target seat map has now gotten bigger, and the PCs has gotten smaller. This is not to say Spruce Woods just needs that extra push to turn orange next time out, but the thin result and weak PC campaign means the Tories cannot now take Spruce Woods for granted. Volunteers and money from traditionally safe rural seats will be pressed to stay home instead of being deployed to Winnipeg to bolster local campaigns there.

More immediately ominous for the blue team are not the safe seats of southern rural Manitoba but the swath of “switch-seats” circling Winnipeg. A Spruce Woods-type swing to the NDP in those areas would yield Interlake-Gimli, Swan River, Red River North, Dawson Trail, Springfield-Ritchot, Selkirk, and Brandon West.

There is another, overriding reality for the Tories. It is not just facing a preternaturally popular premier but a pre-history of established NDP voting patterns. There have been 15 provincial elections since 1969. The NDP have won nine of them, beginning that year; the PCs just five. Right now, they’re on track to win a tenth. If there is a natural governing party in Manitoba, it is the NDP.

As the PCs contemplate a rump status future, they need to confront their biggest challenge: the party’s negative brand. Rebuilding requires rebranding. Rebranding first, to remove the lingering, corruptive odour of the Stefanson government, campaign, and transition. Rebranding second, to broaden their base by appealing to young families and female voters in urban and suburban Winnipeg, the only pathway to becoming competitive in the city once more.

Last year, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer won the first Labour election in almost two decades by convincing people he had “changed this party permanently.” It was the essential precondition Labour needed to regain voter trust.

Manitoba’s PCs need to do the same. Fast.

After all, they cannot take much more of this Spruce Woods-level of winning.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.