Conservative candidates have been absent from more than half of debates in province

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This article was published 13/10/2015 (3625 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Local Conservative candidates have skipped more than half of all debates organized across Manitoba.

Tuesday night, candidates gathered at a Wellington Crescent church for a forum on environmental policy, likely to be the last of nearly 40 debates so far this campaign in ridings across the province.

Dozens of people, including candidates from the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens attended the event. No Conservative candidate agreed to participate despite repeated requests made to national and local campaign organizers since before the writ was dropped Aug. 2.

Organizers say the lack of a Conservative candidate means voters are won’t get a representative sample of all parties’ policies.

“Instead, we’re getting every party except the one in power,” said Megan Krohn, the water program manager at the Manitoba Eco-network and one of the organizers of the debate. “They’ve left this big hole.”

The same coalition of environmental groups organized a similar debate during last year’s civic election and it attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

Since the campaign began, there have been at least 37 debates, most organized by students, seniors, downtown advocates, unions, chambers of commerce and others. Conservative candidates have attended only 17. Typically, Greens, NDP and the Liberal candidates have attended every debate or forum to which they’ve been invited.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

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Over the weekend, Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Bergen got into a war of words with the organizers of a debate planned Thursday at Portage Collegiate Institute. Bergen is not attending the public event and says she was excluded by organizers. She also took issue with the fact a former candidate for the provincial NDP is a member of the debate’s organizing committee. Members of the committee have said they allowed Bergen to choose any date that suited her schedule and offered copies of correspondence with her campaign to prove she’d been invited.

Not all Conservative candidates ducked debates. Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa candidate Bob Sopuck participated in what turned out to be a testy public forum last week in Rivers. Provencher MP Ted Falk took part in his first debate in Steinbach after sidestepping several during the riding’s 2013 byelection

Some candidates, including Winnipeg South’s Gordon Giesbrecht, have shied away from public events but have attended in-class forums organized by area high school students. And, many Tories have participated in the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce’s “candi-dating” events across the city.

Conservatives argue there is little value in attending debates, especially when they’re organized by groups normally opposed to the Harper government, such as unions, environmental groups or poverty activists. Typically, there are few undecided voters in the room who might be swayed, and the hours spent preparing for a debate and attending one could be better spent meeting voters at the door.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca