PCs face a political-succession challenge

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/06/2021 (1755 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I read a lot of books about British Columbia’s political history while growing up in that province. One was David J. Mitchell’s Succession: The Political Reshaping of British Columbia, which examines the resignation of Social Credit premier Bill Bennett in 1986 and the subsequent leadership race to replace him, which former minister Bill Vander Zalm won. Vander Zalm went on to lead Social Credit to yet another victory in the next provincial election.

Political succession — moving from one party leader to another — is a tricky feat for any governing party. Leaders tend to step down when things are tough, handing an old-in-the-tooth government and harried legislative record to a successor who must immediately be on defence. Often, succession is accompanied by subsequent electoral defeat. But Social Credit, Mitchell argued, had cracked the code of political succession by replacing a long-term and unpopular premier with a new, popular leader who continued to win.

Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives may now be looking to the old Social Credit Party for inspiration. Premier Brian Pallister has promised to stay on through the pandemic, but is widely expected to depart shortly after COVID-19 is brought under control.

Manitobans can therefore expect a leadership race in the near future, and we will see if the Manitoba PC Party is up to the challenge of political succession. But what will that look like?

The biggest clue is the current government’s standing in the polls. Public approval of the government has been low for months, but has recently cratered. Polling released by Probe Research last week showed 47 per cent of Manitobans would vote for Wab Kinew’s NDP if an election were held today. Only 29 per cent of Manitobans would still vote for the PCs.

That gulf is even wider in Winnipeg, where provincial elections are won and lost. And the PCs face a daunting obstacle to re-election, in the form of a gender divide in party support, 55 per cent of women supporting the NDP compared to 21 per cent supporting the PCs.

These numbers cement what will be the central challenge of succession for the PCs: taking a government that is very unpopular and righting the ship in time for the next election.

The first consequence of this unpopularity might be a winnowed-down list of leadership candidates. Some potential candidates may look at the current poll numbers and decide that righting the ship is next to impossible. No one wants to be a sacrificial lamb, so A-list candidates might decide to take a pass rather than committing substantial time and effort only to be shellacked by Kinew in 2023.

Succession will need to include some distance between the old and new PC leaders. It will be difficult for ministers in the current government to distinguish themselves from Pallister, and this will likely be more so for ministers who are identified with the government’s pandemic response. Instead, the party may look to an outsider to put a fresh face on the provincial Tory brand.

Selecting a female leader could help to address the party’s current lack of popularity with women.

Once the leadership race is over, succession will likely take the form of the new leader distancing him or herself from the Pallister record. Contentious legislation may be dropped. The new leader may reach out to certain groups — for example, public-sector unions — that have experienced Pallister’s hard-nosed negotiating style.

There is still time before the next election, and some PCs may be hoping the NDP will enter a period of internal discord before then. There is also the possibility the PCs can benefit from going back to the well and employing personal attacks related to Kinew’s past personal indiscretions and comments.

I wouldn’t count on either scenario. Both Kinew and his party have been steady and disciplined since the last election, emphasizing traditional NDP issues but for the most part standing by while the PC government has immolated.

There is an important epilogue to the story of the B.C. Social Credit Party: Vander Zalm seemed to solve the challenge of succession, but as anyone familiar with B.C. history knows, Vander Zalm, despite being an outstanding campaigner, was a disastrously poor premier and ended up resigning in scandal. Social Credit was subsequently badly beaten and, in fact, no longer exists as a competitive party in British Columbia.

Losing elections can be healthy for political parties as they regroup, reorganize and re-orient themselves. Social Credit never got that chance.

Here in Manitoba, some PCs may have already resigned themselves to the view that dragging the party up from its current position in the polls is next to impossible. For them, succession might involve accepting time out of office in order to start building toward challenging Premier Wab Kinew in the future.

Royce Koop is an associate professor in the department of political studies and co-ordinator of the Canadian studies program at the University of Manitoba.