So-called fringe party garners game-changing votes

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This article was published 26/04/2016 (3461 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Party may have cost the Progressive Conservatives two seats in Winnipeg in the provincial election last week.

Labelled a fringe party throughout the election, the anti-tax party wound up snagging a potentially game-changing number of votes in Concordia and Elmwood, perhaps helping seal a victory for NDP MLAs Matt Wiebe and Jim Maloway, respectively.

Veteran MLA Maloway barely hung on in Elmwood, with fewer than 100 votes separating him and Progressive Conservative candidate Sarah Langevin after the results of the April 19 provincial election were announced.

Albert Ratt, the candidate for the anti-government, right-leaning Manitoba Party, managed to garner 582 votes in the northeast suburban constituency, votes that could have gone Blue and would’ve clinched the victory for Langevin.

Missing from the ballot? A Liberal or Green Party candidate, giving the centre-left vote almost solely to the NDP. The Manitoba Liberals dropped candidate Kurt Berger after a charge of domestic assault from his past surfaced during the election.

A similar situation happened in Concordia, where Wiebe won by fewer than 300 votes to second-place finisher PC candidate Andrew Frank. A rival Manitoba Party candidate received 252 votes. Again, there was no Green Party candidate to siphon votes from the NDP. Donovan Martin nabbed 618 votes for the Manitoba Liberals.

While it is not certain every vote for the Manitoba Party is a vote that would’ve gone Tory, the right-of-centre platform of the anti-tax party would have appealed more to a Tory electorate as opposed to the NDP, argues Paul Thomas, a professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba.

“In terms of ideological orientation and particular policy stances of the Manitoba Party, to the extent they’re known… to extent you can get a read of the party it seems to be a right-of-centre-party, so there may be some people who felt Brian Pallister muted his ideological leanings or orientation and they wanted a true, rock-ripped Conservative option,” Thomas said.

The Manitoba Party was created last year and brought together a motley crew of political gadflies such as former city councillor Harvey Smith’s constituency assistant Joe Chan, former city entomologist Taz Stuart and party creator Gary Marshall. The party pledged a flat income tax of 10 per cent, a PST reduction to four per cent from the current eight, fewer regulations and the end of red-light and photo-radar cameras.

The party ran 16 candidates and received slightly more than 4,800 out of the 440,000 votes cast.

It made headlines when Stuart quit as interim leader and after the party’s website advertised Smith as running in Minto without Smith’s knowledge. Anyone who paid attention in Fort Rouge will remember rapping candidate Matthew Ostrove’s “Welcome to Fort Rogue” — a rhyme he used to introduce himself in debates.

Alternatively, some of the votes earned by the Manitoba Party could be in protest of the other two more established parties, Thomas argued.

“Maybe it is a sign that when people were casting around for a way to express discontent with the political parties and what they were offering in terms of ideas,” Thomas said.

A request for comment from Marshall, the Manitoba Party’s leader, was not returned.

kristin.annable@freepress.mb.ca