Mad Max late to right-of-centre festivities in Portage-Lisgar
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Monthly Digital Subscription
$4.75 per week*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Billed as $19.00 plus GST every four weeks. Cancel anytime.
It’s not clear yet whether the good people of Portage-Lisgar should be honoured or concerned that Maxime Bernier wants to make this federal riding his home.
In a thoroughly telegraphed but woefully underwhelming announcement last Friday, the People’s Party of Canada leader announced he was going to be a candidate in the June 19 byelection in Portage-Lisgar, one of four key byelections to be held that day in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
You could tell by the tone of his news release that he thought this was going to be big news; unfortunately for the PPC leader, the national media reacted with little more than a shrug.
Still, Mad Max’s arrival in the middle of the country raises a couple of important questions.
Related Items
Voters heading to polls in four federal ridings
Will this riding serve as the fertile ground on which Bernier can grow the base of the PPC and make Canadian political history? Or, will his party’s fortunes — which have hovered just short of a breakthrough — wilt like wheat in a Prairie drought?
In the final analysis, Bernier’s decision to play the political carpetbagger in Manitoba says a lot about the steep hill facing the PPC as it attempts to become the sixth party in the House of Commons.
In theory, Bernier could have run in any of next month’s four byelections, including in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, the Montreal riding held for 15 years by former astronaut and Liberal cabinet minister Marc Garneau. Bernier is, after all, a native Quebecer and represented the federal riding of Beauce (south of Quebec City) for 13 years.
However, he tried twice (in 2019 and 2021) to recapture Beauce and in both instances, he finished comfortably in second place. The thought of competing for a seat in a Liberal stronghold in ultra-urban Montreal was, in the final analysis, not all that appealing.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Maxime Bernier, the People’s Party of Canada leader, announced last week he was going to be a candidate in the June 19 byelection in Portage-Lisgar.
The same predicament faced Bernier in Winnipeg South Centre, one of the longest-held Liberal seats in Canada. Ben Carr, son of the late Jim Carr, who held the riding for many years and served in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, is hoping to keep the seat in the Grit fold.
Winnipeg South Centre is as inhospitable a riding for Bernier as Notre-Dame-de-Grace. The PPC ran a candidate against the elder Carr in 2021 and received only two per cent of the total votes cast.
That leaves the Ontario riding of Oxford, which has been left open thanks to the departure of Conservative MP David McKenzie. Oxford is considered a Tory stronghold and the PPC captured a respectable 6,500 votes — 10 per cent of the total — in the 2021 federal election.
But a right-of-centre voter in southwestern Ontario is perhaps not the same kind of right-of-centre voter likely to flock to the PPC. Even with anti-vax and anti-mask sentiments running hot across Canada, MacKenzie was still able to collect nearly 30,000 votes, overwhelming the PPC result.
So, by default, that leaves us with Portage-Lisgar.
Bernier knows full well that southern Manitoba has become a hotbed of far-right, libertarian activism, the core attributes of PPC supporters. With arguably the lowest vaccination rate in the country, it was not surprising the PPC and candidate Solomon Wiebe were able to collect some 9,790 votes in the 2021 election.
Manitoba is also a province where Bernier got great headlines for being charged two years ago with breaching pandemic restrictions. It is a brilliant coincidence that on Tuesday, just four days after he announced his Portage-Lisgar candidacy, Bernier is scheduled to make a court appearance to contest his June 2021 arrest and charges for violating pandemic restrictions.
When you’re campaigning on an anti-government platform, being arrested by the Deep State is priceless political marketing.
And yet, even with all those positive signs, there is evidence the voters Bernier needs to win this byelection are already comfortable tucked into the folds of the Conservative party.
When you’re campaigning on an anti-government platform, being arrested by the Deep State is priceless political marketing.
For evidence of that, you need only look at the results of the recent Conservative nomination in Portage-Lisgar to see how successful the federal Tories, behind the hard-right leadership of Pierre Poilievre, have been at recruiting far-right voters.
Former Tory MLA Cameron Friesen — a health and finance minister in the Progressive Conservative government who was considered to be a thought-leader for the far-right and ultra-religious sects within the provincial caucus — was considered to be a strong option for the nomination to replace Conservative MP Candice Bergen.
However, when the final results were announced, Friesen was left behind in the dust of Branden Leslie, Bergen’s former campaign manager. Leslie, who organized pro-freedom rallies and is well-equipped to talk the libertarian talk, is a potent opponent for Bernier.
Leslie, who organized pro-freedom rallies and is well-equipped to talk the libertarian talk, is a potent opponent for Bernier.
And therein lies the rub for the PPC leader: riding voters who share the same ideological plain as the PPC leader are fully and completely embedded in the federal Conservative party riding association, and likely in the Tory voting base.
Bernier can rail on about the “Fake Conservative party,” the “radical left” and “woke culture” all he wants. In Portage-Lisgar, it’s a song often sung by others with deeper roots in the riding.
dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com
Dan Lett
Columnist
Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.
