Manitoba PC leadership race a contest between self-described outsider, two-time MLA
Wally Daudrich says he wants to 'clean up' party, while Obby Khan says he can unite it
Manitoba's Progressive Conservative leadership race is a two-candidate contest between a twice-elected sitting MLA who vows to unite the party and a self-described outsider who promises to clean it up.
PC leadership candidates Obby Khan and Wally Daudrich have started their campaigns in a lengthy leadership race that culminates with an election on April 26.
On the first weekday after the ballot was effectively set, both candidates made an effort to distinguish themselves.
"I'm the outsider. I'm the guy who's coming in to clean up the party," said Daudrich, 61, who lives outside Morden, Man., in the RM of Stanley and owns three businesses in Churchill, Man.
"There's a lot of things that need to be cleaned up and I'm your guy to do that."
Daudrich is a longtime PC member who has sat as a member of the party's executive and also ran twice, in 2008 and 2011, as a federal Conservative candidate in what was then called the Churchill riding.
He said he wants to shake up a party he says has become too reliant on top-down leadership
"I don't want the PC party being a place for elite leadership that knows how to do things and doesn't look to the rank-and-file party membership for guidance," Daudrich said in an interview outside his home in Stanley.
"There's a bible verse that says there is safety in a multitude of counsellors and I think our membership knows the direction that we need to go in."
Daudrich, who runs a hotel, an ecotourism company and a greenhouse in Churchill, said Manitoba's economy has failed to grow as quickly as the economies have grown in neighbouring Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Manitoba is generating revenue befitting a province with a much smaller population and needs to mine more gold, zinc, graphite and rare-earth minerals, he said.
"We need to start putting our big boy pants on and actually we can grow and I believe I'm the person to do that because I've done it with my own business," he said.
"The PC party has not had that boldness in the past, not not just in the recent past. We can't trust the socialists to grow the economy because it's kind of like a herd of cattle or a herd of cows milking cows: They will milk the economy and we haven't seen this totally yet, but after a few more years you'll see them dry up the supply of milk."
Khan, a former Winnipeg Blue Bombers offensive lineman who started up several businesses before being elected to the Manitoba Legislature in the 2022 Fort Whyte byelection, said the main task of the next PC leader to win back the trust of Manitobans following the party's crushing defeat in 2023 at the hands of the New Democratic Party.
"We have to build our relationship back with them, and we also have to work for accountability and transparency. This has been something that the the party has suffered from and I don't think it's just this party. I think it's all over politics," Khan said in an interview outside the Whyte Ridge Community Centre.
Both Khan and Daudrich said the party's 2023 campaign turned voters away from the party. Only Daudrich, however, criticized the party's decision to campaign against searching a landfill north of Winnipeg for the bodies of murdered Indigenous women.
Khan said Daudrich is using "really dangerous language" in the leadership race, noting his opponent told the Western Standard newspaper he would "throw out the garbage" within the Progressive Conservatives and that an "internal cleansing" is warranted within the party.
"I believe in our Progressive Conservative values. I'm not going to tear the team apart. I'm not going to tear this party apart like the my opponent wants to do. I believe we can be left, centre and right, all together, messaging for a better Manitoba," Khan said, framing the party election as a choice.
"Do you want to go with the Progressive Conservative candidate like myself who wants to build the party together from the left to the right and the centre? Or do you want to go with someone who wants to tear it down?"
PC members will get to hear directly from Khan and Daudrich Wednesday evening at the Delta Hotel, during a question-and-answer session hosted by former MLA James Teitsma.
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