Do Manitoba voters have a viable third option?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2022 (899 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whether Manitobans realize it or not, the 2023 general election campaign has begun.

We can debate the precise date when the campaign started – choose between when Heather Stefanson became premier or when the writ was dropped for the Fort Whyte byelection – but the battleground ridings have been identified and the ballot-box questions are being written.

For the governing Progressive Conservatives, their argument for re-election comes down to this: “We may have made mistakes during the pandemic, but so did every government. Given the NDP’s long history of mismanaging our health-care system, economy and education system, a Kinew NDP government would only make things worse.”

In other words, “We may be bad, but the NDP would be way worse.” It’s not exactly an inspiring message, is it?

The Tories’ other attack line, which we are already seeing on social media, is that “Wab Kinew is a bad man with an ugly history. Don’t be fooled; he hasn’t changed.”

The NDP’s attack lines are simpler: “The current government is incompetent. An NDP government would be better. It’s impossible to be as bad as this government.”

“And, by the way, Wab’s grown up. He’s a good dad and, unlike Stefanson, he actually cares about Manitobans.”

That last line is important, because voters must decide how comfortable they are with the thought of Kinew as premier. He must convince them he is no longer the person he once was.

There is plenty of evidence that suggests Kinew is a changed man, but his past isn’t his biggest challenge. It’s the NDP’s history of incompetence. Their mismanagement gave Manitoba the longest health-care wait times in the country, and that no doubt hindered the current government’s ability to respond to the pandemic.

Having said all of that, the NDP’s current strategy seems to be to let the Tory government defeat itself. They are sitting back, confident Manitobans will hand power to them next year. They perceive themselves as Manitobans’ only alternative to a bad government, and are happy to win by default.

They are so confident in victory that I hear some are already arguing over who will get which government office.

That’s a mistake. They should not assume that Manitobans pine for another NDP government, as opposed to simply wanting a different government. The results of the recent Fort Whyte byelection, in which star NDP candidate Trudy Schroeder placed a distant third behind runner-up Liberal Willard Reaves, may be a signal that Manitobans want change but not necessarily of the orange kind.

The wild card in the 2023 campaign could be the Manitoba Liberals. They are currently stuck at 15 per cent in the province-wide poll, but Reaves’ strong performance in Fort Whyte may be a sign that voters are willing to consider the Libs as a viable third option for their votes.

The upcoming election is beginning to feel like the 1988 Manitoba election campaign, in which voters had to choose between an unpopular NDP government, a Tory opposition they didn’t really trust and an intriguing third option: Sharon Carstairs’ Liberals.

The difference between then and now, of course, is that Carstairs and her team of candidates were able to deliver 20 seats in 1988. It is an open question as to whether leader Dougald Lamont and the current crop of Liberals is even remotely capable of repeating that effort next year.

The opportunity is there, but the Manitoba Libs have a long history of blown opportunities.

If they are really serious about wanting to be viewed by voters as a viable option, they need to do a far better job of telling Manitobans who they are and what they stand for – the two mandatory ingredients for success in politics.

They must assure and convince voters they would deliver fiscal responsibility with a social conscience, and that they would do it with a level of competence that Stefanson’s Tories and Kinew’s NDP are incapable of delivering. It’s a message that could resonate with voters who are tired of the usual two choices.

The first step in winning an election is convincing voters you are a viable option. The Liberals’ Reaves did that in Fort Whyte, but can the Liberals do it province-wide?

The answer to that question could decide who our next premier will be.

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