Notable landmarks on election landscape

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/10/2023 (745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gone are the days elected MLAs celebrated in their riding with the people who helped them win. This time around, while some of the winning candidates offered a quick thank-you at their campaign offices, most of the candidates for the NDP, Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals headed straight to the party’s main headquarters to celebrate or commiserate.

With the NDP racking up seats, but before the final results were known, the mood was already more subdued than celebratory at the former Celebrations Dinner Theatre on Pembina Highway. That’s where Manitoba Progressive Conservatives gathered to watch the election results roll in.

There were gasps, followed by silence, at the PC campaign party when Dougald Lamont announced he was stepping down at leader of the Manitoba Liberal party after the results showed he had lost his St. Boniface seat to the NDP.

The NDP’s Logan Oxenham will become the province’s first transgender MLA. Oxenham won Kirkfield Park and defeated former Tory environment minister Kevin Klein just 11 months after losing to him in a byelection.

Progressive Conservative MLA-elect Trevor King now has the safest job in the province. King, who won in the Lakeside riding, which includes Teulon and Stonewall, is only the fourth person in more than a century to represent the area.

Former Liberal premier Douglas Campbell represented the area from 1922 to 1969 — a 47-year span and the longest ever for a Manitoba MLA. Campbell was followed by Tory MLAs Harry Enns (1969-2003) and Ralph Eichler (2003-2023).

It wasn’t easy voting Green in Steinbach. That’s because Green Party candidate Gabrielle Simard-Nadeau suddenly withdrew her name less than 24 hours before polls opened Tuesday at 8 a.m. The party’s leader said Simard-Nadeau withdraw because she had made a mistake in her nomination papers.

Elections Manitoba couldn’t recall whether any candidates in previous elections had withdrawn so late in the process; any votes cast for Simard-Nadeau were counted as rejected.

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Two former Winnipeg Blue Bombers squared off against each other in Fort Whyte, and Tory Obby Khan came out ahead of Willard Reaves, who ran under the Liberal banner. The NDP’s Trudy Schroeder, the former Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra executive director, finished in third. And a former colleague of hers at the WSO, ex-president Tim Burt, ran as the Progressive Conservative candidate in neighbouring River Heights and finished third.

The election saw a total of 189 candidates and six registered political parties across the province. While both the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democratic Party had candidates face off in all 57 of the province’s ridings, the Manitoba Liberals came up eight short, running only 49 candidates. Next in order were the Green Party with 13 candidates, and the Communist Party of Canada and the Keystone party with five candidates each. Three independents also ran.

Kevin Rollason
Reporter

Kevin Rollason is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He graduated from Western University with a Masters of Journalism in 1985 and worked at the Winnipeg Sun until 1988, when he joined the Free Press. He has served as the Free Press’s city hall and law courts reporter and has won several awards, including a National Newspaper Award. Read more about Kevin.

Every piece of reporting Kevin produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.