Judy’s campaign started well, but went downhill from there

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2010 (5076 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 2010 mayoral race in Winnipeg will go down in history as the battle that never was. It could have been a real tilt; in the end, incumbent Sam Katz steamrolled his chief opponent, Judy Wasylycia-Leis. There was a time just a few weeks ago when it appeared as though it would be a much closer race.

A poll released in early October suggested Katz was still out in front, but Wasylycia-Leis had the momentum and was closing the gap. And then, she fizzled. Sam beat her by 25,000 votes and that is, in any analysis, a butt-kicking.

It might not be fair to dwell too long on the reasons why Wasylycia-Leis lost; no challenger has unseated an incumbent mayor in this city in more than 50 years. However, against those long odds, she still ran a bad campaign.

Early on, the strategy for Wasylycia-Leis seemed simple: She would pick away at Katz’s negatives while positioning herself as the positive alternative. She needed a limited field of challengers, so the anti-Katz vote wasn’t split. And she would employ the NDP election machine to swarm Katz on e-day.

In many ways, she got the favourable conditions she was looking for. The earliest stage of the campaign saw Wasylycia-Leis hammer away at Katz’s lack of transparency and accountability. There were only two serious candidates and her campaign seemed poised to galvanize a wide spectrum of anti-Katz constituencies. The race narrowed.

However, behind the scenes, a series of tactical errors began to pile up, limiting her appeal across party lines. Nothing demonstrates this more than Wasylycia-Leis’ bid to attract Liberals.

The strategy was pretty obvious early on. She recruited Liberal Sen. Sharon Carstairs as a co-chair of her campaign. Calls went out to opinion-leading Liberals, asking them to spread the word Judy was Grit-friendly. Unfortunately, Wasylycia-Leis was carrying some baggage. In fact, to many Liberals she is a rather nefarious character who previously cost them an election.

In the 2006 federal vote, Wasylycia-Leis lodged a formal complaint with the RCMP alleging then-finance minister Ralph Goodale had tipped off some friends on Bay Street about impending changes to tax rules for income trusts. The RCMP broke with tradition and sent Wasylycia-Leis a fax confirming an investigation had been launched. In releasing the details of that fax a few days later, she doomed Liberal fortunes. Several weeks after the Liberals lost, the RCMP did charge someone in Goodale’s office, but cleared the finance minister of wrongdoing. Many Grits still hold a grudge.

Would some of those Liberals have forgiven Wasylycia-Leis for this transgression long enough to give her a shot at toppling Katz? Perhaps. But that was not the only problem she had in her bid to woo Liberals. She was front and centre in the recruitment and nomination of Kevin Chief as the heir apparent to her Winnipeg North seat in the House of Commons. Many Winnipeg Liberals bristled at the sight of her promoting Chief for a byelection battle against Liberal candidate Kevin Lamoureux. The Liberals, desperate to regain some traction in federal politics, were simply not amused Judy just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

Wasylycia-Leis’ inability to find Liberals to hug was certainly not the deciding factor in her defeat. In fact, there may not have been a single deciding factor. Rather, there was a convergence of factors.

Her campaign was thread-bare. Katz’s team theorized Wasylycia-Leis, a feisty opposition MP, could only point fingers. When it came time for her to answer questions, and explain what she wanted to do, she would fall flat. Wasylycia-Leis certainly lived up to that prediction. She frequently told voters she would “do better” but rarely articulated what that meant. And her line of attack on Katz, successful early on, became tired and repetitive. She seemed to run out of material at a critical stage of the campaign.

Perhaps Wasylycia-Leis wasn’t ready to leave the backbenches of federal politics and assume a leadership position. Or, maybe she just couldn’t attract enough of the smartest New Democrats to help with her campaign. Either way, her failure does not mean a centre-left candidate is incapable of winning a mayoral vote. It means that, like so many others, centre-left candidates need to wait until the incumbent vacates the mayor’s office. The last great centre-left hope — Glen Murray — could have run against business-friendly mayor Susan Thompson in the 1995 civic election. But he didn’t; he waited until Thompson retired from politics prior to the 1998 election. And then he triumphed.

For now, Wasylycia-Leis joins a long list of challengers who failed to take down an incumbent. And history will show that it’s a very long list indeed.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca