No longer the party of Duff Roblin

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2023 (739 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“We’re in the fight of our lives”

— Manitoba PC Campaign Manager Marni Larkin, Sept 22.

Even if you stop reading this column right here, all you have to remember about this miserably amateur and tasteless PC election campaign is that the party is in a desperate existential struggle. The campaign manager admitted this to the Free Press seven days ago. When you view the recent wave of PC political ads through that lens, the senseless begins to make sense.

Every informed voter knows how desperate the polls are for the PCs. The key poll was done in recent days by Probe Research. The NDP in Winnipeg has 57 per cent of the vote. The PCs have 28 per cent. Regardless of how the PCs do in rural Manitoba, they cannot form government without a substantially stronger performance in the Winnipeg region, home to two-thirds of the votes.

Until last Saturday, I had never written an obituary for a party’s campaign 10 days before the vote. But that’s what I delivered. Most of the feedback I received from longtime PC voters agreed that defeat was imminent.

They thanked me for posting in public what they were thinking privately about a campaign that disappointed them severely. A consensus of the feedback I received can be covered by three points.

(1) They no longer think the PC Manitoba Party reflects their values as Manitobans. (2) They think the PCs have strayed far from the mainstream party that they and their families had supported. (3) They are embarrassed by what they view as cheap and trashy.

There have been many desperate messages posted during this PC Armageddon campaign. They have repeatedly reminded voters that their key opponent, Wab Kinew, who I think of as the Manitoba premier-in-waiting, has a troubled past. I get that readers have been hearing this for years. It feels older than Portage and Main.

But in the political world, nothing zaps the strength of a message like the passage of time.

Once upon a time, the darkest chapter of the Wab Kinew biography raised eyebrows. Now, it gets barely a shrug. Voters have also been told that only the PC Manitoba party will fight for “parental rights” in the public schools.

I don’t know of many Manitobans who don’t have teachers somewhere in the family tree and at least one teacher active in the system. Based on feedback I receive, few things are more insulting to them than the view that Aunt Sally, and Uncle Jack are under suspicion. The allegation is that our teachers are brainwashing children in a number of ways — even encouraging them to question their sexual identities.

The Manitoba PCs are taking pride in being the only party to defend parental rights. They are indeed the only party slandering school teachers because doing so is well-known political voodoo practised in the United States by far-right lunatics. It is well outside the mainstream of Manitoba kitchen table talk.

When political archaeologists dig up the history of this dreadful campaign, looking for the clues of an imminent PC demise, they will point to a particular message where the party chose to burn buckets of dollars from donors and the sensibilities of its most loyal voters.

The message is “Stand Firm against the unsafe $184 million Landfill Dig.” The Manitoba Conservatives are congratulating themselves for rejecting the idea of searching for the remains of two murdered Indigenous women.

Several weeks ago, I wrote that my political brain told me that the majority of voters silently supported the decision against digging. But when I wrote those words, I never thought the party would make it an issue in the campaign and treat it like a Grey Cup victory.

I never thought the PCs would exploit murdered young Indigenous women to make some clumsy point about leadership character.

The billboard which I first saw on Kenaston Boulevard just days ago, after doing a shop at Costco, made me want to buy a barf bag.

“Stand Firm” falls flat. The message does not evoke strength of character. It does the opposite.

Standing Firm on the remains of murdered Indigenous women is a confession of moral weakness. It illustrates the total collapse of values in today’s Manitoba Progressive Conservatives. As a person who until this week has been for the most part a reliable PC voter, I now view the party of Duff Roblin as the party of Maxime Bernier.

Au revoir.

» Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. This column previously ran in the Winnipeg Free Press