Lessons From Manitoba

On The Left's Biggest Win In A While

Honestly, I can’t stop thinking about Alberta.

It’s not fair to the Manitoba NDP that the only salient thing I can think about in the aftermath of their sizable election victory is two provinces away, but the thing about the Manitoba election is how glaringly easy the NDP had it. Or, more precisely, how fucking terrible the PC campaign was. And given that, I can’t stop thinking about how much better the UCP campaign from May looks with this as a contrast.

Lessons from results are incredibly important, be it for those specific parties, for broader politics, and even for forecasters/pundits/assholes like yours truly. But more than that is honesty, and there is an already existent push to Learn The Lessons from Wab Kinew’s success for other progressive parties in Canada.

Kinew’s campaign was admirable, especially in that he and the NDP avoided an Alberta-style policy blunder the government could latch on to. The fact that Kinew is the first Indigenous Premier of a Canadian Province (not to diminish Territorial leaders’ contributions) is certainly worthy of acknowledgement and celebration. But as Oppositions, sometimes you win government because of your brilliance, and sometimes you win because the other guys are fucking morons.

And I don’t think there’s any lever Justin Trudeau or Marit Stiles or whoever wins the OLP Leadership can pull to make Pierre Poilievre and Doug Ford run shitty campaigns next time around.

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It’s an unfortunate truth of politics that you’re in control, in a sense, of little directly – the quality of your  campaign can’t always win you an election. Bad campaigns have won before because the other side did worse, great campaigns have come up short. It’s much like poker – a game where skill deeply matters, but also where the cards are gonna be what the cards are gonna be. Sometimes you run hot, and sometimes you don’t.

In Manitoba, the NDP played their cards well – they had Kinew give a long, thoughtful speech about his past alcoholism, past actions, faith, and redemption that made it hard for the PCs to attack him. He sounded genuine and sincere about making something of his second chance, which blunted a lot of the effectiveness of the idea he was some dangerous nutter.

That said, from the standpoint of the PCs, it’s also hard to run a traditional law and order tough on crime campaign while you’re also taking out full page ads in the Free Press about how they need to Stand Firm against *checks notes* finding the bodies of two murder victims. Whatever you think of the risks and the costs of the landfill dig, “we only care about the victims of crimes when it’s useful politics” doesn’t exactly scream sincerity and leadership for all.

The PCs answer to increasing hospital wait times was to spend the increase in Federal transfers on a tax cut, their final ad blitz was about not being ashamed to vote for them, and their message seemed the whole time to be predicated on the idea that Manitoba was too blue to elect Kinew et al. The problem is, this is a province that gave Erin O’Toole less than 40% of the vote last time. They ran a campaign for Sasky in a province where the Liberals and NDP got over 50% in 2021.

Did the PCs messaging help them in the smaller cities? Sure, but at a cost. Nearly losing wealthy suburban Tuxedo isn’t worth the few seats of the sort this helped in. And there aren’t going to be a lot of other Conservatives running this bad of a campaign moving forward.

Are there lessons for Trudeau and the Ontario left? Sure, although less for Trudeau. Incumbent campaigns have little in common with Opposition ones, so Kinew’s victory mostly doesn’t help the Feds out. (That said, if the Liberals take “don’t go down obtuse culs-de-sac of your sanctimony and self indulgence from the PCs, might be useful.) Don’t do stupid shit is always a good reminder, and given that both Del Duca and Horwath ran bad campaigns last time, a reminder that “don’t make unforced errors” is a key part of politics would be nice. But let’s not pretend that the actual main reason for the scale of the NDP’s success isn’t in the control of other parties looking to emulate it.

Will Poilievre and Ford run good campaigns next time? I have no idea, and I stand by my scepticism about Skippy as a general election candidate, even though economic discontent means he’s better suited to winning than I believed possible. But at a fundamental level, praying your opponents shit the bed isn’t a strategy, it’s a hope.

The answer, if the left wants to revitalize itself in places where the right is not self immolating, is harder, but also pretty clear. The left won in Manitoba running a leader who, despite his history, was honest with the people and didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t. And at the end of the day, that’s probably the best tack for the left to take moving forward.

What has caused many of the left’s recent campaigns to fail – against Ford and Danielle Smith especially – is a lack of overarching coherent narrative. There is an opening to put integrity and ethics back at the forefront of politics in a way that will work in both Manitoulin and Milton, Tuxedo and Thunder Bay. And if the left wants to win they’ll need to look beyond the specifics of Manitoba and realize the opening they have.

Manitoba was a great victory for the left and I’m immensely happy it happened. It’s also not a roadmap for the broader left to follow, because relying on this level of shit campaigning from the right is a recipe for disaster. Let’s celebrate the win and be happy we finally got rid of a morally bankrupt government.

But let’s also make sure that the left across the rest of the country is ready to win even when the right doesn’t hand it to us on a silver platter.