Strategies and second chances

On a sunny afternoon in the riding of St. Boniface-St. Vital, Liberal candidate Ginette Lavack’s campaign headquarters is bustling.

Volunteers dip in and out, scooping up campaign literature and double-checking their door-knocking maps. Among them, Doug Lewis wanders in and asks Lavack if he can sit in and listen to her platform while she’s being interviewed by the Free Press.

Eventually, he speaks up, painting a picture of the riding — he lives in the area, and knows that while the St. Boniface side may seem like an easy win for the Liberal party, moving south towards St. Vital, the colour slowly shifts from red to blue.

Lewis has a thought about how to turn the tide, asking the Liberal candidate if she plans to be part of any debates or town halls with Conservative candidate Shola Agboola.

“I think reaching out to all of the ‘blue’ people in my mom’s church and all of those people, I think, would be useful,” he tells Lavack.

It speaks to her campaign’s strategy for appealing to voters — with a snap election in play set for April 28, she has just a few weeks to reach as many people in the region as possible, and her team has focused on encouraging Liberal voters rather than converting those already Conservative.

“Right now, the biggest part of the job is identifying Liberal voters, because we want to convert those into people that actually show up at the polls to the greatest extent that we can,” Lavack, 50, said.

“It’s important to send me in locations where that’s likely to happen, because we don’t have time to be converting people, to try to get them on our side.”

The former director of the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Centre (and before that, Festival du Voyageur) is entering the political sphere for the first time. She has big shoes to fill — former Liberal MP Dan Vandal easily beat out the Conservative candidate in three elections between 2015 and 2021, before announcing his retirement from politics late last year.

“There are some folks that are undecided, and so we’ve had a few conversations where it might a little bit more back and forth and asking questions, and they’re trying to get a sense of me,” Lavack said.

During Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s visit to Winnipeg last week, Lavack was always close by. She took questions from media when he held a morning news conference in Transcona and helped introduce him with fellow candidate Ben Carr at a rally that evening.

“Right now, the biggest part of the job is identifying Liberal voters, because we want to convert those into people that actually show up at the polls to the greatest extent that we can.”– Liberal candidate Ginette Lavack

She acknowledges the fact that St. Boniface-St. Vital is an important riding for the Liberals.

“It’s a microcosm of the country … It’s this real mix, I think, of cultures, of ideologies, of people,” she said.

“There’s still a more heavy concentration of, I think, constituents that share Liberal values, unless something’s gone really sideways and really wrong.”

Agboola gets a second chance to paint St. Boniface-St. Vital blue after finishing a distance second to Vandal in 2021. This time, he has recruited former Tory MP Candice Bergen to support his campaign.

Agboola, a provincial corrections worker, did not respond to requests for comment. His campaign manager told the Free Press he did not plan to hold media interviews.

As St. Boniface-St. Vital goes, so, too, goes the country at large, a Manitoba political expert noted.

“St. Boniface is something of a bellwether, I would say one of the main bellwether ridings in Manitoba that tends to follow the national trend,” said Paul Thomas, University of Manitoba political studies professor emeritus.

Thomas said that with Vandal no longer an option, there’s an opening for the Conservatives.

“Among the Winnipeg ridings, I would put (St. Boniface-St. Vital) at the top of my list of ones where, if (Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre) Poilievre can regain some momentum, the Conservatives might just stand a chance in there,” he said.

Former St. Boniface-St. Vital Conservative MP Shelly Glover knows all too well how quickly a riding can shift.

Glover served under former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government from 2008 to 2015, the only Conservative MP in St. Boniface-St. Vital to ever hold more than one consecutive term.

She withdrew from politics in 2015, choosing to prioritize time with her family, and Vandal defeated her replacement, François Catellier, with more than double the number of votes (28,530 to 14,005) that year.

Glover later returned to politics in 2021 to challenge for the Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership but narrowly lost to Heather Stefanson.

“I knew it was going to be an uphill battles … I realized that a lot of our voters, they too, did not understand the difference between the party platforms or policies.”– Former St. Boniface-St. Vital Conservative MP Shelly Glover

The former police officer was new to politics when she began campaigning federally. She spent more than two years on the trail before she won the nomination, focusing on winning over constituents with consistent contact and conversation about the issues that mattered to them.

“I knew it was going to be an uphill battle, and when I talked to people as I went door-to-door for two-plus years… I realized that a lot of our voters, they too, did not understand the difference between the party platforms or policies,” she said.

“Many typically vote along the lines of their parents or their grandparents.”

Complicating the issue at the time was what she believed was a divide between Francophone and Anglophone communities, she said. The riding has since welcomed waves of newcomers from different countries, faiths and first languages, which she said has weakened that divide.

“I do hope that we see a Conservative candidate (win),” she said. “What’s of interest to me in watching this is that change with so many immigrants in St. Boniface now, I think it’s going to reflect a big change in the results.”

In a social media post from his 2021 campaign, Agboola said he “came from Nigeria many years ago with nothing but hope and aspirations.”

Glover helped run Agboola’s nomination campaign during his first run and described him as an “amazing individual.”

St. Boniface-St. Vital has never been won by the NDP. Other than several short periods of Conservative leadership, it has largely been a red sea since the 1920s.

NDP candidate Thomas Linner is well aware of this reality.

The former director of Manitoba Health Coalition said in the midst of a campaign that seems focused on trade wars with the U.S., the impact on everyday people and their priorities is being lost in the fray.

“I do think that something that is being lost in this campaign is, as we talk at 20,000 feet, and we talk about large scale economic shifts and that sort of thing is, what is the impact on real people?” Linner, 47, said.

“There is a difference between the people who have lived the global elite, rarefied life, and those of us who are dealing with the consequences of those decisions made at those high elites.”– NDP candidate Thomas Linner

“What are the dangers? What are the dangers to people’s public health care? What is the danger to affordability for families? What is the danger of mass unemployment? What does that look like?”

When he talks to voters, Linner tells them he has faced those problems head-on — be it financial, employment or mental health struggles — in ways that Carney or other candidates may not.

“There is a difference between the people who have lived the global elite, rarefied life, and those of us who are dealing with the consequences of those decisions made at those high elites,” he said.

“It’s time for a voice that is more for us working people who understand the concerns that we have every day, and I’m going to keep making that case to people.”

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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