Stefanson resigning Tory leadership, remaining MLA in Tuxedo seat

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This article was published 04/10/2023 (805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Less than two years after being sworn in as the first woman to serve as premier in Manitoba, Heather Stefanson announced Tuesday night that she’ll step down as leader of the Progressive Conservative party.

Manitoba voters elected a majority New Democratic Party government led by Wab Kinew, Canada’s first First Nations premier-designate.

“It has been the honour of my life serving the people of Manitoba,” Stefanson said with her husband Jason and children Victoria and Tommy standing behind her on stage at the former Celebration Dinner Theatre on Pembina Highway. She was first elected in 2000, easily winning a Tuxedo byelection in the seat vacated by former PC premier Gary Filmon.

She didn’t resign her seat in Tuxedo, where her family has lived for generations, she said.

She’s going back to the opposition benches after serving as an MLA there for 16 years until the Tories, led by Brian Pallister, won the 2016 election. She was named deputy premier, justice minister and families minister by Brian Pallister.

In January 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, she was appointed health minister when Manitoba’s health-care system was so overwhelmed it had to send 57 intensive-care unit patients to hospitals out of province.

After support for the governing PCs sank under Pallister’s autocratic leadership and he resigned, she emerged victorious from a contentious leadership contest and became Manitoba’s 24th premier on Nov. 2, 2021, promising a more collaborative approach to governing.

Some observers wondered whether Stefanson’s leadership was doomed from the start, as a woman lead a governing party when things were in disarray.

At first, Stefanson walked the talk, Brandon University political scientist Kelly Saunders said.

“When you meet her one on one, she does seem more personable and friendly and kind, and that sort of carried on for the first little while,” Saunders said Tuesday.

Shortly after she moved into the premier’s office, the Tories killed the widely unpopular Bill 64 that would have eliminated elected school trustees, and they advanced reconciliation efforts, including ending Pallister’s long-standing feud with the Manitoba Métis Federation.

“You do see some conciliation happening there,” Saunders said. “Then, we come to the election campaign and it’s almost like it’s a whole different party and a different leader that seems to be trying to sell a very different message than what we were seeing before.”

That includes far-right leaning promises of increased parental rights in public schools and politicizing calls for a search of a landfill for the remains of Indigenous women police believe were murdered by a serial killer.

They don’t fit with the collaborative image Stefanson promised, and she didn’t seem confident or comfortable defending those planks — to the extent that she didn’t appear at any Winnipeg events in the final week of the campaign.

“They just don’t connect together,” said Saunders.

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“Was she put into this impossible situation by her party and then forced to adopt a series of electoral platforms that maybe she’s uncomfortable with, as the party became more desperate and more negative and reactionary in some of their ideas? Or was this who she was all along, and she just was not a very effective leader?

“I’m not sure if this is sitting well on her shoulders. If that is the case, then it just affirms that parties put women in positions of impossibility and don’t give them the tools to really be able to put their own stamp on the party, but yet they still have to wear that moving forward.”

Saunders said the question for voters then becomes who the real Heather Stefanson is.

“Was she really given the confidence and the support from her caucus and her team and her advisers to really be her own leader, or is she the fall guy? Or is she just an ineffective leader who crafted a bad strategy and wasn’t able to sell it?”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

Carol Sanders is a reporter at the Free Press legislature bureau. The former general assignment reporter and copy editor joined the paper in 1997. Read more about Carol.

Every piece of reporting Carol 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.