Battle lines drawn in Brandon East

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This article was published 16/09/2023 (773 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The battle for Brandon East has been building up for a long time and is poised to be the city’s most hotly contested battleground on election day next month.

Geographically, Brandon East is the largest of the three constituencies in the Wheat City, and its boundaries are easy to figure out.

If you live south of the Assiniboine River and east of 18th Street, you’re in Brandon East. While the boundaries for Brandon constituencies were rearranged ahead of the 2019 election, they’re the same this time around.

Spruce Woods — containing Brandon’s North Hill and several adjacent municipalities — has voted for the Progressive Conservatives in every election since it was created in 2011.

Brandon West, located south of the river and west of 18th Street, has reliably elected a Tory representative since it was created in 1966, except for four years in the 1980s and between 1999 and 2007.

From 1969 to 2016, Brandon East was represented by two Manitoba NDP MLAs — Len Evans and Drew Caldwell. Evans served eight terms, while Caldwell served four.

Len Isleifson, a former Brandon city councillor, ended the NDP’s tenure by picking up a win for the Progressive Conservatives in 2016 with 52.2 per cent of the vote compared to 36 per cent for Caldwell and 11.8 per cent for Liberal candidate Vanessa Hamilton.

Then, in 2019, Isleifson earned re-election with 51 per cent of the vote compared to 36.34 per cent for NDP candidate Lonnie Patterson — now president of the party — and 12.66 per cent for Liberal candidate Kim Longstreet.

In that election, voter turnout was at 45.7 per cent. As of April 2023, Elections Manitoba states online that there were 14,292 registered voters in Brandon East.

Now Isleifson is looking for his third consecutive victory on Oct. 3 as the only Brandon MLA running for re-election this time around.

While the other NDP candidates in Brandon were only officially nominated this summer, the party’s candidate in Brandon East has been in place for a lot longer.

Glen Simard, a local teacher, won his nomination last year and has been working on his campaign ever since.

Rounding out the field is Trenton Zazalak, a business instructor at Assiniboine Community College who was nominated to run for the Manitoba Liberals in June. Zazalak previously ran for the Liberals in 2011 in Spruce Woods, coming in fourth to the PCs’ Cliff Cullen.

Catching up with the candidates this week, both Simard and Isleifson said health care is the top concern for people they’re talking with on the campaign trail.

“A lot of it is not necessarily the state of health care but the lack of nurses, the lack of physicians, front-line workers,” Isleifson said. “There’s concern for wait times and things like that.”

By comparison, Simard said the people he has spoken with are concerned with the state of health care, but not the care they receive.

“They have concerns about the concerns of the Brandon Clinic’s walk-in,” Simard said. “Without having access to a general or family physician, walk-ins have become people’s means to receive care, and that’s concerning to them.”

Health care is one of the biggest topics for those Zazalak has spoken with, but affordability is another major concern.

Since 1999, the winner in Brandon East has been a member of the party that has won the most seats. It has been seen sometimes as a bellwether for the political mood of Manitoba residents.

That’s an assessment that Simard agrees with.

“It’s a constituency that has everything,” he said. “It’s an urban constituency and a rural area. We have homelessness, crime, we have middle-class, blue-collar families and we have a large hospital, a university, community college, all of the things you would have in a large city.”

For Isleifson, he believes it comes down to the individuals running in the constituency and how dedicated they are to it and the community.

“I would love to think that if I was to be elected, that we would form a government and continue the work that we’re doing. In the past, that’s not always been the case. I believe Len Evans was in opposition, so it’s a tough thing to say.”

In the last four years, Zazalak said he has gotten the sense that elements of American politics have been filtering northwards and changing Canadian politics. Anything could happen next month at the polls.

“I’m trying to get people engaged,” he said. “The only way to take things back into your own hands is to get involved.”

During the two terms of the Progressive Conservative government, led first by Brian Pallister and now by Heather Stefanson, there has been a concerted effort to gradually eliminate education property taxes assessed on the province’s landowners.

This year, the province committed to sending out rebates equal to half the education property taxes property owners are paying. NDP Leader Wab Kinew has committed to keeping the rebate in place should his party form government, though he stopped short of committing to phasing it out completely.

Neither party has discussed a replacement funding model for education should the tax be axed altogether.

Simard said the NDP is committed to creating stable, predictable funding for schools to allow school divisions to better plan ahead for their budget, though the party hasn’t come up with an alternative funding model yet.

According to Isleifson, his government has been working on an alternative funding model but he wasn’t sure of its current status.

He said he wanted people to know that the money being sent to Manitobans as rebates isn’t coming directly from education. All the money collected for education property taxes is going toward the education system, and the government is sending the rebate cheques from a different source.

Over the last year, before and after the election campaign started, the Progressive Conservatives have made a lot of spending announcements and promised tax breaks while still committing to balance the books.

Isleifson acknowledged that on the surface, it looks like a tricky card to play.

“But when you really look at it, there’s two ways the government can raise money,” he said.

“One is by increasing taxes, which we are not doing — we’re actually decreasing taxes. And the other one is increasing your tax base, which is building on the economic fortune of the province, bringing more people into Manitoba, increasing your tax base and therefore increases your taxes. So at the end of the plan that we have, it appears to be working.”

Zazalak said the Liberals are taking a different tack. The party’s platform said it would keep the education property tax in place and repeal 80 per cent of the rebate that has been offered, targeting those rebates to people with lower incomes as an affordability measure.

“We’ve analyzed what the Conservatives have done, they’ve borrowed money to pay for that,” he said. “That ideology, as an individual, I certainly liked when I got my refund back. It was very handy, especially in the current economy. However, if we’re going in debt to fund education, that’s not sustainable.”

Last month, Stefanson made a pledge to update the Public Schools Act to expand parental rights.

Specifically, she said a re-elected PC government would make it so parents have the right to be informed about curriculum, bullying and other behavioural changes, advance notice about presentations given by people outside the school system and to provide consent before an image of a child is made, shared or stored.

Simard said that these are things that teachers are already carrying out as part of their duties.

“Being able to talk to your teacher about student programs has always been something that exists in schools … it already exists in the form of school media release forms, online curriculum documents, school newsletters, things like permission slips, parent councils, school trustees elected by the community. These are the things that already exist in schools.”

If elected, Zazalak conceded that the Manitoba Liberals are unlikely to form government. However, the party could hold the balance of power if neither the NDP or PCs control a majority of seats in the legislature.

In that situation, “whoever is the party in charge still has to at least listen to a Liberal voice,” he said. “In that past that hasn’t happened. We’ve been swerving one way on the street with the NDP and swerving back with the PCs.”

Should that happen, Zazalak said the Liberals would make the ruling party think hard about the policies they want to put in place and keep government accountable.

Election day is Oct. 3.

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