Electoral judgment delivered in Tuxedo

Opinion

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This article was published 20/06/2024 (445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The nouns “humility” and “humiliation” have different meanings, but both are rooted in the same Latin adjective — humilis, which translates as “humble,” as well as “grounded,” “low,” “from the earth” and (literally) “on the ground.”

The result of Tuesday’s provincial byelection in Tuxedo has no doubt left Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative Party with a jumble of emotions that includes, in varying measures, all of the above etymological expressions.

A scant eight months after being ushered from office by voters in last fall’s general election, the PCs this week demonstrated that their unravelling was not yet complete. The Tories did something that had never been done and that most affiliated with the party likely believed never could be done: losing the safest PC seat in Winnipeg, a seat that had been coloured bright blue on electoral maps since its inception in 1981.

Voters in the affluent west-Winnipeg enclave previously represented by Gary Filmon and Heather Stefanson — both of whom eventually assumed the mantle of premier — have opted this time to send New Democrat Carla Compton to the legislature as their MLA.

To describe this development as a seismic shift in Manitoba politics would be an understatement worthy of Richter-scale measurement. Suffice it to say that in the capital region area in which all provincial elections are decided, the rejection of current PC policies and attitudes is now complete.

Compton, a registered nurse who ran unsuccessfully against Stefanson in Tuxedo in 2019, defeated PC candidate Lawrence Pinsky by more than 600 votes. Pinsky, a lawyer, had attempted early in the campaign to introduce Middle Eastern tensions into the local byelection debate by alleging some NDP MLAs support “extremism” related to the war in Gaza.

The dubious tactic clearly found no more purchase than the more broadly divisive strategy employed by the Tories in last fall’s election.

And now the PC Party finds itself, as the aforementioned etymology suggests, flat on the ground, leaderless and apparently directionless as the NDP under the leadership of Premier Wab Kinew continues to enjoy a prolonged post- election honeymoon period.

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Recent polling shows the New Democrats with 59 per cent support in Winnipeg and 51 per cent approval provincewide; even outside the city, where Tory support remains forever steadfast, NDP approval has risen from 36 per cent to 40 per cent since last fall’s vote.

Clearly, there is much Kinew and company have done right, both before and since assuming the reins of power. But the premier was wrong in declaring, at Compton’s victory celebration, that Tuesday’s outcome was solely a result of the candidate’s hard work and not related to voter dissatisfaction with the PC Party.

No disrespect to Compton and her tireless team, but the Tories’ loss of “safe” Tuxedo is completely a reflection of how unpopular they have become. Even during the heady NDP-majority era of immensely popular premier Gary Doer, the one thing the Tories could count on in Winnipeg was a firm grip on the armrests of the Tuxedo seat.

But beginning with the austere policies and confrontational style imposed by Brian Pallister immediately upon winning an unprecedented majority in 2016, and continuing through the pandemic’s acceleration of the health-care system’s decline and the questionable leadership and disastrous election-campaign thrust of Stefanson and her team, the PCs have absolutely been the authors of their own demise.

Fully in the grips of the humiliation they have invited, it remains to be seen whether their newfound flat-on-the-ground perspective will imbue them with the humility required to reject what led to their unravelling and start anew at a brand of conservatism more suited to Manitoban sensibilities.