A turn to the right is the wrong direction

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This article was published 07/10/2023 (750 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Stefanson nudged out New Democrat candidate Larissa Ashdown by 263 votes.” — Free Press, Oct. 5.

Two weeks ago on this page, I wrote the obituary for the Manitoba PC campaign and Heather Stefanson’s cup-of-coffee career as premier.

If I had told you that the carpet bombing of PC ridings in Winnipeg would include Tuxedo, you would have told me that I was more conjurer than commenter. But there was no wizardry at this key board.

The column that was published 10 days before the election was researched thoroughly in my drive through every acre of South Winnipeg. I saw the PC ground game blunder with my own eyes. In many city blocks held by PCs there were no lawn signs at all — none.

I won’t steal your precious time with a primer on how a political ground game is supposed to work. What works? I felt many things in my political bones. But nothing felt more obvious than the absence of a PC work ethic.

It looked like the volunteer effort to get their signs parked on lawns was absent. I get that many people still want to work from home. But you can’t do door to door campaigning in pajamas.

There was a sea of orange in South Winnipeg. But blue, not so much. The PC campaign that was a hellscape on billboards, bus benches and recycling bins, looked like garbage where it mattered the most. Private citizens were not standing firmly with the PCs.

The NDP was crushing them in the sign wars, much like the Bombers crushed the Riders 51-6 in the Banjo Bowl. I didn’t need a pollster or a pundit to tell me that October 3rd was going to be a wipe out and that Heather Stefanson would like the horse that can’t finish.

But even though I saw the coming blowout, I didn’t think that it was possible for the PCs to lose Tuxedo.

The riding that was created 42 years ago bleeds blue. It has never been captured by another party. In the 10 elections up until this one, the PCs won every single time. Three of four people in the riding own their home. The median income is $400,000/year. Tuxedo is 85 per cent white. That ratio isn’t unique in rural Canada. But in urban/suburban Canada, Tuxedo is one of the whitest provincial ridings in the country.

For the NDP to get within a whisker of a win, many blue voters would have to switch to orange.

They did.

The election math tells you that switching was going on everywhere. Winnipeg has 32 of the province’s 57 seats. On Oct. 3, the PCs took only three — barely more than 10 per cent. Call this year’s edition of the Manitoba PCs, “Ten per cent Tories.”

That’s unkind, but not unfair. And it could have been worse. If they lost Tuxedo, and they just about did, the PCs would have harvested only six per cent of Winnipeg seats.

Why the focus here on the shabby PC performance in Winnipeg? There is only one reason.

Many PC supporters are permanent residents of a riding called Denial. They will tell you that provincially the NDP only received 17,000 more votes than the PCs.

They will say the NDP beat the PCs by less than four per cent in the Manitoba popular vote. Some of these denialists will tell you that the PCs only need to tilt a little more to the right, to beat the NDP in the next go.

There is one thing these PC boosters have in common. Please forgive me for saying that people who tell you the PCs are not right wing enough need to have their heads examined. The popular vote is for excuse makers.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Apparently someone forgot to swear her in as president. In this country, Andrew Scheer won the popular vote. But no sane person uses the words “former Canadian prime minister Scheer.” Two-thirds of the votes are in Winnipeg. If the PCs aren’t competitive in the provincial capital, they cannot form government.

Winning three out of 32 Winnipeg seats is not competitive. If the PCs choose to become even more of the right wing jackass they showed us in this campaign, history will view the party as a court jester for a string of NDP governments.

A far-right PC Party will turn Wab Kinew into King Kinew.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com