Low wasn’t the only way to go

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/10/2023 (730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘It was the campaign we needed to run.” — Marni Larkin, Manitoba PC campaign manager, Free Press interview, Oct. 6.

If you give a hoot whether or not the PCs have a future in Manitoba, you need to resolve a key question.

Does the party need to run obscenely tasteless campaigns to be competitive in our province?

I will not waste your time reviewing every insulting message the Manitoba PCs delivered in the 2023 campaign. There is a consensus among PC supporters that the Amateur Hour approach in Manitoba is a born loser. The question of whether or not nasty is necessary goes to the heart of the argument the PC campaign manager advanced in her interview with this newspaper.

If the PCs need to run campaigns like the one that mercifully ended 10 days ago, is there any point in supporting this party with memberships, money and votes?

I’m not a member of any political party. But as a citizen and a public commenter, I have for most of my adult life been transparently supportive of Conservative parties federally and provincially. I’m not a partisan. But I am not dishonest about who I am. PC policies over the years were generally the closest fit with my values.

If I buy into the idea that the PCs in Manitoba need to run campaigns like the most recent one in order to survive at the ballot box, it will be difficult for me to support this party. Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback I have received from longtime PC voters in the past four weeks, I know that my moderate sentiments are widely shared, not just in Winnipeg, but throughout Manitoba.

It’s probably worth examining the proposition that the architects of the PC campaign have put to the residents of Manitoba.

To believe that this was the campaign that the PCs “needed to run” you have to believe the campaign was otherwise unwinnable.

In the Free Press interview, the PC campaign manager said “a year ago, it looked like we were only going to win 12 seats. We had to build a campaign to avoid that kind of result.” That is a believable argument, if you require no evidence to back it up and you want to take her at her word.

I have talked to several professionals with Manitoba campaign experience. None of them think the PCs were experiencing a nightmare scenario, a path to only a dozen seats. That hasn’t happened to them since the 1950s.

To be clear, I am not calling the campaign manager a liar. She is an experienced professional who has gained the trust of many in retail politics with real objectives and real campaign budgets. Like everyone in that stressful business, she has lost some and won some.

She has the freedom to say that, while the PCs lost in 2023, it could have been much worse had she not taken a rugged, if not reckless, approach. In Winnipeg, the PCs melted down to three seats out of 32. They won 19 seats outside Winnipeg. If you buy the campaign manager’s story, that 22 seat total is 10 more than they expected to win a year ago.

Since we have no data to back up the story that the PCs were that deep in the dungeon, the polite conclusion is that this campaign boss is spinning.

Earlier this week I did a podcast interview with David McLaughlin. He has worked for many conservative governments, federal and provincial, including the Manitoba PC government of Brian Pallister. He ran both of Pallister’s winning campaigns in 2016 and 2019.

As spin goes, he says the idea that the PCs were going to hemorrhage dozens of seats without this kind of campaign, is spin “the size of a windmill.” In looking at a number of data points, including overall turnout, which was no larger than it was in the election four years ago, and the fact that the PCs lost several Winnipeg seats by small margins, McLaughlin thinks a more balanced campaign could have saved their bacon in 2023.

I cannot close this visit without telling you that the professional who has worked for Brian Pallister and Brian Mulroney and many others, is a centrist. He believes at the core of his political soul that if the PCs view a sharp right wing trajectory as their salvation, they are destined to become Wab Kinew’s most reliable tools in building a lengthy career as premier of Manitoba.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com