A face-to-face pace in tight race Newly named, configured riding pits current, former area MPs in battle being fought on largely undecided doorsteps By: Malak Abas Posted: 5:14 PM CDT Thursday, Apr. 3, 2025 Last Modified: 9:05 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 5, 2025 Updates

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In Winnipeg West, a riding where voters have no qualms about flip-flopping between red and blue, Liberal candidate Dr. Doug Eyolfson faces a unique challenge.

While Eyolfson is door-knocking on Lake Street, it’s clear voters are focused on issues over parties and some are undecided.

When Eyolfson reaches Luke Detscher-Choma’s door, the 27-year-old software developer politely hears him out, takes his campaign literature, but declines permission to place a lawn sign. He’s no party loyalist, he says, and he’s voted across the board over the years.

He plans to follow both Eyolfson and Conservative two-term incumbent Marty Morantz’s campaigns before making a decision.

“It’s based on issues, platforms and where I’m at in my life,” he told the Free Press.

It’s a frequent comment from constituents in the riding formerly known as Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley: they’re waiting to hear more, they’ve voted Liberal and Conservative in recent years, platform is paramount.

In other words, no safe bets.

Eyolfson knows this intimately. After he defeated Conservative Steven Fletcher — who had been the riding MP for over 10 years — in 2015, the emergency-room physician served just one term before losing to Morantz in 2019 and 2021.

Both elections were close, and he lost by just several hundred votes, equivalent to one per cent of the ballot, in the latter campaign.

“It is challenging. It means I have to work hard. I have to work very, very hard. Nothing is a given,” said Eyolfson, 61, as he made his way to another house.

“I need to be at the doors, talking to people, finding out what is on your mind, what do you want to see? Hopefully answering their questions.”

“I need to be at the doors, talking to people, finding out what is on your mind, what do you want to see? Hopefully answering their questions.”–Dr. Doug Eyolfson

He’s hoping to gain support by talking to voters face-to-face as often as possible, between hospital shifts. He’s no stranger to campaigning at this point, but is still learning new tricks — he shares, laughing, that if he can win over a hesitant constituent’s dog, they’re more likely to open up and chat.

The polls showing a surge in support for the Liberals since Mark Carney took over the party leadership last month haven’t hurt, either.

“I’m hearing very positive things about how the tide appears to be turning,” he said.

“People have a great deal of confidence in Mark Carney now, and also, a lot of them are just very frightened by what’s happening at the border, and they want someone who’s going to stand up.”

Unseating Morantz wouldn’t be an easy feat, said Paul Thomas, University of Manitoba political studies professor emeritus.

The Tory has gained a reputation as a “numbers man” in the riding, enforced by his time as the Conservative associate shadow minister for finance and middle-class prosperity.

It could give him an advantage in Winnipeg West, which contains several affluent neighbourhoods, Thomas said.

Morantz had been especially active on social media and in connecting with seniors, a pertinent move considering 2021’s census found 22 per cent of the riding’s population (pre-boundary change) was over the age of 65, Thomas noted.

“You just watch what he reports on his constituency site and on his Facebook postings — he’s been to this seniors group, he’s talked to this rotary club…. He knows he’s in a highly competitive riding.”

Morantz has no plans to rest on his reputation; he said that over three weeks, he and his team have knocked on more than 25,000 doors.

“I’ve always felt that a sign of a well-run political campaign is when all a candidate has to think about is knocking on the next door,” Morantz, 62, told the Free Press.

“I’ve always felt that a sign of a well-run political campaign is when all a candidate has to think about is knocking on the next door.”–Marty Morantz

A private-sector lawyer prior to entering politics, Morantz has a long history of serving the area in different capacities. From 2014 to 2018, he was the city councillor for Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood, before making the jump to Ottawa.

He’d served on then-mayor Brian Bowman’s executive policy committee and chaired both the finance and infrastructure committees.

Voters are most concerned about what he describes as the “lost Liberal decade” — expensive, inaccessible housing and the skyrocketing cost of living.

“It’s reflected at the doors,” he said.

“When I hear, particularly young people, say, ‘You know, I grew up always thinking, if I worked hard, went to school, that I could at least achieve a similar standard of living that I grew up with.’ Now they can’t even hope or think about affording a home.”

This election is, in many ways, unlike any he or Eyolfson has previously participated in. It’s the first since the riding was renamed and reshaped in 2023, and the impact of the cross-border trade war with the United States has changed the way voters are thinking.

Morantz said he plans to stick to the campaign style he knows best.

“It doesn’t really change the fact that the only way that I know to really reach voters and connect with them is on the doors. That won’t change,” he said. “And what I’m hearing from (the Liberals) doesn’t really reflect what we’re seeing on the doors.”

Both candidates are running with an “incumbency factor” and a public profile that will likely keep the race tight, said University of Manitoba political studies adjunct professor Christopher Adams.

“There’s a pattern in North America that when you go to the suburban ring of a city, that’s where in the United States you see more Republicans, and in Canada, you tend to see more Conservatives in many parts of the country,” Adams said.

“This riding, Winnipeg West, does fit the profile of a typical Conservative riding (and) it would be a bit of an upset for the Conservatives to lose it. But in this election. with the swing of the polls, it might be the Liberal’s victory.”

The new federal electoral map means the riding is larger and its name is shorter, dropping the clunky Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley moniker and gaining Tuxedo and the Rural Municipality of Rosser, formerly in Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman.

The boundary redistribution came after Statistics Canada released new population counts in February 2022 that found while the province had an overall 11 per cent increase in population since 2011, Winnipeg West had grown by just 2,903 people in that time, 11.6 per cent below the provincial average. Rosser was added to the riding to increase its population and improve voter parity in the province, according to a 2023 report from the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission.

The commission said the name was changed to bring it more in line with other ridings in the city, including Winnipeg Centre and Winnipeg South.

Those border changes could have a role to play in the result of the election, said former Tory MP Fletcher.

In his last federal campaign in 2015, the NDP candidate at the time was replaced by the party mid-race, and the party’s vote quickly vanished, shifting to Eyolfson, Fletcher said.

“I think we’re seeing this from across the country. If that happens in a riding like (Winnipeg West), that’s going to be a problem if you’re a Conservative party supporter,” he said.

“Now, what would offset that is Tuxedo and Rosser have been added. Tuxedo is generally Conservative federally and provincially, and Rosser is Conservative federally, but there aren’t a lot of people in Rosser.”

Whether the current lack of support in Manitoba and across Canada for the federal NDP could be Eyolfson’s gain remains to be seen, he said.

“Tuxedo also has an NDP MLA for the first time in its history — who would have thought?” Fletcher said.

“It’s really a riding to watch.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

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