Mayoral race all sideshow, little substance

Well, there’s one thing that can be said about Winnipeg’s 2026 mayoral race that sets it apart from most previous campaigns for city council’s top position:

It isn’t boring.

In most civic elections, the power of incumbency and/or familiarity gives one mayoral candidate such a profound advantage that the outcome is all but a foregone conclusion and the lead-up to voting day becomes both uninteresting and largely irrelevant.

This year’s race, to the contrary, has been noteworthy for the unusual level of friction, controversy and mud-slinging that has been injected into the early part of the campaign.

Unfortunately, the fact this contest has been anything but boring isn’t really a good thing.

There have been allegations. Assertions. Insinuations. Claims and counter-claims, some of which carried more than a slight whiff of insult aimed at an opponent. The conversation has been pointed, but it would be hard to argue it has raised the tenor of political discourse or done much to help voters better understand the intentions of those with mayoral aspirations.

Earlier this week, two of the higher-profile candidates for mayor, Kevin Klein and Mike Vogiatzakis, traded accusations that each had attempted to meddle in the other’s campaign by offering a post-election job at city hall in exchange for an agreement to withdraw from the mayoral race.

The thinking, one presumes, behind the unproven assertion(s) is that both Klein and Vogiatzakis occupy the right-of-centre portion of the political spectrum and the elimination of one of them from the race would give the other a better chance of unseating incumbent Scott Gillingham.

Not surprisingly, each denied the accusation leveled by the other, with Klein dismissing it as a “smear campaign” and Vogiatzakis calling Klein unworthy of trust.

Klein followed up on Monday by stating he was also offered an inducement to exit the 2022 mayoral race, by someone affiliated with the provincial Progressive Conservatives who promised Klein a position within the party if he dropped out, which would presumably have made it easier for then-councillor Gillingham to defeat former mayor Glen Murray.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Head Start

Weekday Mornings

A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day.

Sign up for Head Start

Sign Up

I consent to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies.

I consent to CASL agreement.

Klein says he rebuffed that offer, citing his commitment to his campaign and those who had worked so hard on it. He finished third behind Gillingham and Murray and subsequently ran successfully in the December 2022 byelection for the Kirkfield Park seat in the Manitoba legislature.

One can only speculate whether Klein’s motivation for revealing the 2022 attempt at election interference is, as he states, to demonstrate that such incidents have occurred in the past and are still happening, or whether it’s merely an effort to drag frontrunner Gillingham into the political muck created by the current Klein-Vogiatzakis claims and counter-claims.

Perhaps it dawned on the former MLA that the war of words was doing nothing to advance his electoral prospects or those of Vogiatzakis; instead, their back-and-forth volley of election-interference insinuations was only making both of them look bad and, consequently, enhancing the incumbent’s image by comparison.

With too little time remaining for image rehabilitation, perhaps the logical (but by no means palatable) alternative was to pull the entire front-running field down to the same level — a level significantly below that at which civic-election debate should be contested.

What is clear, however, is that while the current campaign hasn’t been boring — in fact, some may actually have found the whole clumsy exercise mildly entertaining — Winnipeggers trying to make up their minds about how to cast their ballots on Oct. 28 will have gained little in the way of meaningful insight from this slowly compounding inter-candidate kerfuffle.