The kids are all right

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2014 (3987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After years of rock-solid cabinet discipline, we’re watching the provincial NDP implode in real time, with no sense yet how the brinksmanship will end. That ruckus in Premier Greg Selinger’s government made national news just three days after Mayor Brian Bowman’s landslide victory, a come-from-obscurity win that shocked even Bowman himself. And, if it weren’t for the all-consuming mess at the Manitoba legislature, we’d be turning our gaze toward four Tory-held federal ridings and the Liberal and NDP challengers already working to steal them.

All that is big news. Below the surface of these headline-grabbers, though, there’s the start of a deeper shift in Manitoba politics, one that finally makes us a little more interesting and a little less predictable. And the shift is largely generational.

For years, the same backroom politicos dominated most party executives. The same names typically ended up on the ballot. The same people ran campaigns. Now, when you look around a campaign office or a fundraising dinner, you may wonder where the heck all the hipsters came from. A new crop of young, capable, aggressive, partisan activists have begun to assert themselves in local politics. Bowman’s team was lousy with them — mainly young Liberals and Red Tories without a home. Communications guys Conor Lloyd and Kelly McCrae, lawyer Corey Shefman and several other up-and-coming backroomers helped Bowman, himself a young dad, orchestrate one of the slickest and most successful campaigns in recent memory.

Some of those same people have been working to fix the tattered Manitoba Liberal Party, now helmed by young lawyer Rana Bokhari. The jury’s out on how successful they will be. The party is still impoverished, struggling to gain visibility and saddled with some stubborn internal dissent of its own. But, those new politicos are energized by national Trudeaumania, solid polling numbers locally and a few upcoming federal races expected to be tough and lively.

The Winnipeg Labour Council is also seized by a new generation of activists, notably president Dave Sauer. He’s no longer new — he’s been president since 2010 — but his council was more active, more strategic and a wee bit more effective this civic election than in many campaigns past.

Another example — Robert-Falcon Ouellette, the 37-year-old First Nations academic, whose small team of mostly young or rookie supporters earned nearly as many votes as the veterans managing Judy Wasylycia-Leis’s mayoral campaign.

The exception to this wider generational shift may be the NDP. A review of Wasylycia-Leis’s campaign team conjures up many familiar faces — party stalwarts, established union leaders, longtime provincial staffers. Same with any NDP convention, which now tend to be populated by mostly baby boomers. There’s been a slow exodus of many young policy and political staff at the legislature, die-hard New Democrats. Their replacements, while young, aren’t the same kind of true believers. Thesa names now leading the charge against Selinger’s leadership are, to a large degree, the old guard — the Wayne Copelands, the Becky Barretts, the Darlene Dziewits, along with the Gang of Five cabinet ministers, most of whom have been MLAs for at least a decade.

The shift underway in Manitoba politics is also part cyclical. There is always, at some point, a “time for change” feeling that grips the electorate. It’s typically a slow burn in Manitoba. We tend to favour stability and centrism. But there’s evidence, including a poll released Tuesday that put the NDP at just 27 per cent support among decided voters, we’ve reached that “time for change” moment. That feeling, that the established names have had their day and it’s time for someone new, may have helped undercut Wasylycia-Leis’s support and catapult Bowman into the mayor’s office. It’s the same tenuous feeling provincial Tory Leader Brian Pallister is trying to harness. It’s only now, at the last minute, that some in the provincial NDP have begun to sense it.

For the next few weeks or months, we’ll be caught up with the political changes we can see — the cabinet ministers resigning, the thrown-together throne speech, a leader fighting back. Underneath all that, things are changing in Manitoba politics in ways trickier to see but maybe more important.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca