Results shed light on election battle in city

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This article was published 26/01/2020 (2243 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — As MPs return to Parliament today for the spring session, new data show how the three main parties won seats in Winnipeg.

Elections Canada provided the Free Press with poll-by-poll results from last October’s election, which the agency will officially release this spring.

The data give a block-by-block analysis of how residents voted, and where in Manitoba the parties pushed the hardest.

The data suggest the parties focused their ground game on specific ridings, sweeping most polling stations in some ridings, while hardly marking their presence in others.

“We did see a snapping back to the more historic patterns of Winnipeg in the most recent election,” said Christopher Adams, a longtime University of Manitoba political scientist.

NDP MP Daniel Blaikie kept his seat by getting votes from across virtually all of Elmwood-Transcona, despite running against a Conservative who had been MP in the previous term. Lawrence Toet won 24 of the 162 polling stations, not including special ballots such as postal votes.

The Liberals didn’t win a single polling location in that riding.

Similarly, new Tory MP Raquel Dancho took three-quarters of all polling districts in Kildonan-St. Paul, with the rest splitting between the NDP and Liberals.

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Meanwhile, People’s Party candidate Steven Fletcher hardly made a dent in the Conservative party’s quest to take the riding that straddles the city’s west and Headingley.

The Liberals won 55 of 158 polling stations, all within the city, and just 10 of which came from a vote split with the Tory winner, Marty Morantz.

MPs are elected based on overall votes in their riding, not on the proportion of which polling stations they win. However, the data show which neighbourhoods parties lean on for support.

On a provincewide basis, Adams said the results match a longstanding pattern of northern Manitoba’s unionized mining towns siding with the NDP, while the Conservatives hold sway over southern farmers, Mennonite towns and small business owners.

Many First Nations reserves sided with the Liberals, though some supported the NDP.

The red dots that represent places such as Sandy Bay and Swan Lake in a sea of blue suggest the Liberals still rank high among First Nations, despite controversies over pipelines and the ouster of former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.

The Liberals barely have a presence in rural Manitoba. Adams says it’s because previous governments brought in the metric system, bilingualism and firearms registries, and were not viewed as being farm-friendly.

In Winnipeg, the Liberals swept areas with a high proportion of immigrants, and those in line with the city’s median income.

Former cabinet minister Jim Carr easily won his riding, which tends to vote conservative provincially. River Heights sided with the Tories, while Tuxedo and Fort Rouge kept with the Liberals.

Adams chalked this up to Carr’s connections with the city’s business community, while the city tends to re-elect its cabinet ministers.

The Liberals held on to Winnipeg North and St. Boniface-St. Vital by targetting those ridings’ most densely populated neighbourhoods.

Another riding the Liberals held, Winnipeg South, is marbled with polls that voted red and blue. Adams says this reflection the area’s heterogenous nature, with neighbourhoods that lean toward one party based on its demographics. Those areas have a mix of incomes, a strong immigrant presence, francophones near St. Norbert and a mix of ages because of the presence of retirement homes and the University of Manitoba.

The other large parties kept with what they know.

“The NDP held onto its historic areas (…) blue-collar, working-class neighbourhoods and low-income individuals, especially in areas in the core part of the city,” Adams said, pointing to downtown, the North End and Elmwood.

Adams says doughnuts provide a visual illustration of how conservative parties across Canada and the United State court voters.

“In the doughnut phenomenon (conservatives take) the outer rings of cities, in which we are looking at middle-class suburban folks,” Adams said, for whom low taxes and property crime rank high in their voting decisions.

The Green party won a single polling district, with 44 per cent of the South Indian Lake reserve, where the candidate had relatives.

— With files from Michael Pereira

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca