What does the PC stand for in party’s name? Seems to be Pretty Confused

It should have been obvious from the beginning that the Manitoba Progressive Conservative party was going to have trouble holding itself together under Obby Khan.

The warning came in April 2025, when the now-former PC party leader narrowly won the leadership over far-right populist candidate Wally Daudrich.

Technically, Khan won. Politically, however, it was a more complicated result.

Daudrich received more votes than Khan, but Khan prevailed because the party used a constituency-weighted points system that gave him just enough of an advantage to put him over the top.

That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. And it exposed a problem that has now come crashing down around the party.

Khan quit as party leader Monday, citing internal conflict he could no longer tolerate. But the party’s problems are much bigger than that.

The Manitoba PCs are caught in the same political struggle that is troubling many conservative parties across the country: a battle between traditional progressive conservatives and a growing far-right populist movement that wants to take the party in a different direction.

Khan was never the natural champion of the latter.

The former Winnipeg Blue Bomber came into politics with little political experience, first winning the Fort Whyte seat in a 2022 byelection.

He became the first Muslim elected to the Manitoba legislature and, three years later, found himself leading the provincial opposition.

But he wasn’t Wally Daudrich. And that mattered.

Daudrich represented a much more populist, combative strain of conservatism that has been gaining influence on the political right in Canada. He lost the leadership race, but his supporters didn’t disappear.

Neither did the political movement they represent.

Khan didn’t just quit as leader, he quit the PC caucus altogether and will sit as an independent, saying internal party fighting has become so consuming that he could no longer reconcile it with his responsibilities to Manitobans.

That’s a remarkable thing for an opposition leader to say.

It’s even more remarkable when you consider that Khan survived a caucus confidence vote just days earlier by a 13-6 margin, according to his own account.

Yet he still concluded that the fight inside his own caucus had become untenable. That tells you something about the depth of the problem.

So does the departure of Stephen Carter, the party’s campaign director, who resigned after Friday’s caucus vote, saying he no longer had confidence in the direction the party was taking.

Carter’s explanation was particularly revealing. He said he wanted to run a clean campaign in which everyone understood what they were trying to achieve and everyone was moving in the same direction.

He said he could no longer do that. And there’s the problem in a nutshell. The Manitoba PCs don’t simply have a leadership problem, they have an identity problem.

They have yet to decide whether they want to be a traditional progressive conservative party that appeals to the political centre-right, or a more populist, grievance-driven conservative party that courts the far right.

The party has been wrestling with that question for several years.

It became especially obvious during the 2023 provincial election, when far-right central campaign actors employed toxic and racially charged messaging, which nearly wiped the Tories off the electoral map in Winnipeg.

The lesson from that election should have been simple: Manitoba isn’t Alberta.

Far-right politics may have an audience here, but it isn’t a particularly large one, especially in Winnipeg, where provincial elections are won and lost.

The PCs seem unable to agree on that basic reality. And until they do, changing leaders isn’t going to solve much.

Daudrich’s reaction to Khan’s resignation was telling. He celebrated it as the best day for the party in decades and suggested, sort of, an interest in seeking the leadership again — if the party would allow it — or perhaps run as an MLA under the party banner. (It’s unclear exactly what he meant. Daudrich was barred earlier this year by the Tories from seeking the nomination in the Turtle Mountain constituency).

The PCs now have a choice. They can continue fighting over who controls the party, allowing the far-right faction and the traditional progressive conservative wing to pull in opposite directions. Or they can finally have the more difficult conversation about what kind of political party they want to be. That conversation has been coming for a long time.

It should have started after the 2023 election, or at least when Khan won the leadership by the slimmest of margins. Instead, the party muddled along and now the cracks are impossible to ignore.

A leader has quit, a campaign director has quit, caucus is divided and the party is badly behind in the polls. And the person who could once again represent its populist wing is already talking about coming back.

Until the Tories reconcile the bitter conflict that’s tearing the party apart, they are likely to remain exactly where they are now: wandering around the political wilderness, arguing among themselves about who they are while the NDP governs.

That may be the most important lesson from Obby Khan’s brief and troubled tenure as PC party leader.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca