Halfway into Manitoba's election, are the PCs and NDP running out of material?
The NDP is all about health care, while the PCs focus on tax cuts. But are voters still paying attention?
Nearly halfway into Manitoba's 2023 election campaign, the New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives have made it clear what they want voters to think about before they cast their ballots.
For the NDP, it's health care and very little else. Since the start of the formal campaign, the only thing party leader Wab Kinew appears to want to speak about is the state of health care. All the promises he's made — save for one involving former premier Gary Doer — have involved health.
The NDP has promised to reopen emergency wards, improve cardiac care and make it easier for international nurses to work in Manitoba, among other health-care promises.
The party appears to be banking on the notion voters are so fed up with the PC government's restructuring of health care they will vote for change on Oct. 3. It is a very simple strategy.
The PCs appear to be doing everything they can to change the channel.
Most of the Tory announcements to date have involved tax cuts and tax incentives, including promises to eliminate the payroll tax, remove the PST from restaurant meals and cut the taxation rate in half on the first $47,000 every Manitoban makes.
"It's a game that every party plays," said Royce Koop, a political studies professor at the University of Manitoba.
"The dynamic that we've seen so far is the NDP focused relentlessly on health care — the issue that's going to help them — and the Tories are focusing on new issues that aren't health care. I think we're going to see that for most of this campaign."
The problem is, this might not be sustainable for either party. After nearly two weeks of mining the same campaign territory, both the NDP and PCs run the risk of turning campaign consistency into campaign fatigue.
Diminishing returns
Some of the NDP health-care pledges, for example, have been difficult to distinguish from each other, such as separate promises — issued two days apart — to create new community clinics and help family doctors expand their practices.
Likewise, the PCs followed up big-ticket taxation pledges from the first week of the campaign with more incremental measures, such as promises to remove taxes from trees or top up the provincial film tax credit for movies that use Manitoba music for at least half their soundtracks.
The PCs also went off script in a very odd way when leader Heather Stefanson promised to grow Manitoba from 1.4 million people to two million in six years, effectively pledging to triple the annual population growth rate.
There may be a series of diminishing returns in store for both parties, Koop said.
"It does seem the Tories are energetic, but sometimes you don't know where does energetic stop and desperation begins? I think they're just, like, throwing all this stuff out there," he said.
And while health care may be important to Manitobans, the NDP, he added, are beginning to sound like a one-note opera singer.
"It's a good strategy. I know what they're doing. But how do you sustain that? How many announcements can you make? It's already pretty thin gruel."
Parallel campaign on social media
On Thursday, Kinew acknowledged the specifics of each NDP pledge may not reach every voter.
"I understand that folks aren't going to hear every single health announcement that we make," he said, while insisting the daily ritual of hammering home the same subject — health care, health care and more health care — will ensure voters are aware his party has a plan to improve it.
Stefanson, similarly, suggested her party's steady offering of tax cuts will drive home a perceived PC strength.
"These measures will leave more money in Manitobans' pockets each and every year, powering the economy and making life more affordable for Manitobans," she said during a Wednesday morning address to the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce.
There is, however, a campaign running parallel to the party platform announcements. The PCs are using social media to herald themselves as protectors of "parental rights" — whatever voters deem those rights to be — and to drive home their opposition to spending public funds to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of First Nations homicide victims.
Similarly, the NDP are using social media to remind voters of Stefanson's performance as Manitoba's health minister during the deadly third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic — and specifically how she responded to a question about the death of a Brandon ICU patient.
As this is the first provincial election following Meta's decision to blot out Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram, this parallel campaign clearly matters quite a bit.
Mainstream media coverage of election campaign promises still matters, but nowhere near as much as it did in the days when a morning newspaper headline or 6 p.m. TV news lead was the only things campaign managers cared about.
The days when mainstream media coverage drove the fate of elections ended in 2016, when Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency with the help of a sophisticated social media campaign that was unprecedented in its use of psychometric data.
The mantra during elections is campaigns matter. The question in the coming weeks will be which campaign: the one you hear about through so-called legacy media or the one being waged in a more unfiltered manner on socials.
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With files from Cameron MacIntosh