No real winners in Fort Whyte: How every party lost something in Manitoba byelection

In eight straight elections starting in 1999, the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives absolutely destroyed their competition in Winnipeg's affluent Fort Whyte constituency.

In every one of those races, the PC candidate captured an outright majority of the ballots, garnering 52 to 64 per cent of the popular vote. The narrowest margin of victory for the Tories was 1,557 votes, when former party leader Brian Pallister won the 2012 byelection.

Fort Whyte is considered one of the safest PC seats in Manitoba. At least it was before Tuesday night, when the Manitoba Liberals came within a whisker of handing Heather Stefanson's Progressive Conservative government a humiliating upset.

After a seesaw battle that saw saw the PCs and Liberals trade leads for three hours, former Winnipeg Blue Bomber offensive lineman Obby Khan edged past former Bomber running back Willard Reaves by 197 votes.

The margin of the PC victory was less than three per cent of the popular vote. Fort Whyte, once a fortress for the Tories, is now a battleground.

"It's an embarrassment for the government," said Royce Koop, a political studies professor at the University of Manitoba.

"It's a seat that's gone strongly for the Tories ever since it was established. They had a very strong candidate and they pulled out a squeaker. They should have ran away with it."

The PCs were only able to push the football across the goal-line on the strength of advance polls. The Tories pride themselves on identifying their vote early and that organizational strength appeared to make the difference on Tuesday.

Nonetheless, the near-death experience has to make every PC member who intends to participate in the 2023 general election sit up and notice the depth of the public's disdain for the party.

Up until Tuesday, Stefanson shrugged off polls that suggest she is Canada's least popular premier and that Manitobans are least likely to give their government a passing grade on its management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Khan's narrow victory forced her to acknowledge the prevailing sentiment.

"People have come out of COVID. People are really angry right now about a number of things," the premier said Tuesday night.

She went on to opine that this has more to do with the length of the pandemic than her government's performance during the second wave, when Manitoba had Canada's worst COVID-19 death rate, and the third wave, when Manitoba hospitals could not care for all of the province's severely ill coronavirus patients.

Khan was left to acknowledge the near-rebuke more succinctly.

"Tonight was a clear message to us. Your concerns are real and we're going to take them seriously," he said. "A win's a win, but there was a message that was given, and that message is loud and clear: that we have some work to do."

The Manitoba Liberals reacted as if they had won something on Tuesday.

"This is supposed to be a PC stronghold and they barely squeaked out a win," Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said. "They've never gone under 50 per cent and the Manitoba Liberal Party nearly took them out."

Yet they didn't. The Liberals narrowly missed their chance at achieving official party status in the Manitoba Legislature by claiming a fourth seat.

They also missed an opportunity they may not get in Fort Whyte in 2023, despite Reaves' pledge to force a rematch with Khan in next year's general election.

As a party with fewer resources than the PCs and NDP, the Liberals have a much easier time contesting byelections than general elections because they can pour all those limited resources into a single constituency.

So even though Reaves demonstrated Fort Whyte can be contested, the Liberals will have trouble doing that again next year as they try to hold on to the rest of their Manitoba seats.

The Liberals' failure to achieve official party status turned out to be a blessing for the NDP, who do not want voters to consider the Liberals a viable alternative to the PCs next year.

But even the NDP doesn't get away from the Fort Whyte byelection looking good. Compared to the 2019 general election, Wab Kinew's Official Opposition, with candidate Trudy Schroeder, actually lost ground in Fort Whyte at a time when the PCs are widely unpopular.

In the end, the Fort Whyte byelection can be seen a lose-lose-lose proposition for all three of Manitoba's largest political parties.

The PCs were humbled in what was expected to be a shoo-in. The Liberals failed to meet their objectives. The NDP appeared ineffectual.

If voters really are angry, perhaps this was an appealing result.

PCs humbled by narrow win

3 years ago

Duration 2:11

In eight straight elections starting in 1999, the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives absolutely destroyed their competition in Winnipeg's affluent Fort Whyte constituency.