Tory leadership hopeful touts right turn

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This article was published 11/01/2025 (280 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More than 100 people packed a church basement in suburban Winnipeg Wednesday night to hear Progressive Conservative leadership hopeful Wally Daudrich embrace social conservatism and a “mood change” he’s seeing south of the border and across the country.

The owner of Lazy Bear Lodge in Churchill, who said he became part-owner of the Winnipeg Sun last year “because messaging is everything,” is taking on Fort Whyte MLA Obby Khan, a prominent former cabinet minister who played seven seasons with Winnipeg Blue Bombers, to lead the Manitoba PC party.

“The PC party is in trouble,” said Daudrich, pointing to the $851,932 deficit it posted after losing the 2023 election, and Khan campaigning on more “progressive” than “conservative” values.

“We need to actually turn around and look back at what we’ve done in the past and the people that we’ve messed around with and say, ‘Sorry, we didn’t manage things properly.’ We need to be honest, we have to show that we have integrity. And once we do all those things in Manitoba, guess what? Manitoba will bring us back.”

Khan is seen as the front-runner and has the support of party establishment figures, including veteran Steinbach MLA and former cabinet minister Kelvin Goertzen, who served briefly as premier in 2021.

A party leader will be chosen April 26.

At Wednesday’s meet and greet at St. Vital Evangelical Mennonite Church, Daudrich was introduced by Ken Lee, a controversial PC party figure who was applauded when he said there are only two sexes and schools should be educating, not indoctrinating students.

Lee, the party’s former chief financial officer, tried to be a candidate in the 2021 PC leadership race following former premier Brian Pallister’s decision to resign, but was rejected by the leadership election committee without explanation.

He’d been endorsed by the far-right People’s Party of Canada and COVID-19 pandemic restriction opponents such as anti-mask rally organizer Patrick Allard, who attended Wednesday’s event. Lee urged the supportive crowd to back Daudrich.

“There’s a pent-up energy that’s on the right of centre that’s obviously starting to appear in this PC party leadership,” University of Manitoba political studies adjunct professor Christopher Adams said Friday, adding there is a strong right-wing political component in the province.

People in Wednesday’s mostly male, white and middle-aged audience had questions for Daudrich.

He was asked about the drug and crime problems downtown, and responded by pointing a finger at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for legalizing cannabis and being soft on crime, which increased lawlessness and homelessness.

Allowing recreational cannabis sales sent a message to young people that “drugs are fun,” said the married father of five.

“Since then, we’ve been going down. We’ve lost control of our law and order, and had that mood change.”

And then NDP Premier Wab Kinew was elected, promising to open a permanent supervised drug-consumption site, said Daudrich, vowing to ban such facilities if he becomes premier.

“The province is actually the biggest drug dealer in Manitoba,” he told the crowd. “That’s not a good example to have.”

When pressed about his remark afterward, a spokesman for the candidate said “clearly, he misspoke.”

“What he intended to say was that the province is the largest facilitator of drug use in Manitoba,” Mike Patton said in an email.

When one attendee questioned Daudrich about not separating social from fiscal conservatism, the candidate pushed back.

“Social conservatives are those people who want law and order, who want the best education for their kids (and) a health system that reflects their values and (they’re) not forced to pay for things that they don’t agree with,” he said. They want a system that punishes criminals, rather than “pats them on the back and says, ‘Sorry you got caught.’”

A new dad in the crowd asked what Daudrich would do to restore federal support for anti-abortion organizations that offer services to pregnant women “and combat this culture of hate, and a culture loving death that you see being promoted from the federal government.”

He dodged the abortion issue.

“When Justin Trudeau has the time, we can invite him and we can talk to him about that because he’s created a lot of the mood that we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said, adding his concern is provincial health care that’s in “a shambles.”

“The medical system needs money, but it also needs direction that is outside of traditional socialism.”

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He said he plans to grow the party and broaden its base, by requiring MLAs in his caucus to spend a half-day each week contacting random constituents.

“We have some lazy MLAs,” he said. “They have to get to work and that means going to their constituents .… We need to reach out to the average people.”

Socially conservative views resonate with most newcomers and are catching on, said Daudrich.

“We have the gentleman to the south, he helped change the mood,” he said, referring to president-elect Donald Trump. “But it was quite a fight. And we may end up in a fight ourselves here in Manitoba, in Canada, as well. But I’m willing to start that fight. And I mean that in a gracious way.”

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.