Brandon West race too close to call

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This article was published 04/10/2023 (762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s probably not the speech Wayne Balcaen wanted to deliver.

But with the race for Brandon West still too close to call shortly after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Balcaen wanted to at least say something to his election team and supporters.

“We’re so close,” Balcaen joked as he took the podium at The Backyard on Aberdeen Avenue, where about 50 supporters had gathered Tuesday evening.”I just don’t know how long this is going to take so it’s best to talk to everybody now.”

As of just before midnight, Balcaen was ahead of his NDP rival, Quentin Robinson, with 3,852 votes to 3,694 (a mere 158-vote difference). Fifteen out of 15 polls had reported, but Election Manitoba results on its website suggested not all of the advance votes had been counted yet.

Still, Balcaen admitted he was surprised that the race was this close.

“It has changed between PC and NDP before, but yeah I’m surprised at the numbers right now,” Balcaen said of the Brandon West riding. “I’m certainly hoping to see them continue to trend up. It’s been back and forth all night.”

Balcaen, the former Brandon police chief, retired early to run in his first provincial election.

He was challenged for the support of the riding’s 14,522 registered voters by Robinson, a retired family counsellor and United Church minister, and retired teacher and school principal Bill Marsh for the Green Party. The Manitoba Liberal Party didn’t field a candidate in Brandon West this time around.

While the riding — which covers the city’s southwest, south of the Assiniboine River and west of 18th Street — has been held by a Tory MLA for 45 of its 57 years of existence, it has been briefly snatched away a couple of times by the NDP in the not-so-distant past.

Henry Carroll represented the riding from 1981 to 1985, as an NDP MLA at first and then an independent, and Scott Smith held it for the NDP from 1999 to 2007.

And, with outgoing PC MLA Reg Helwer declining to seek re-election after 12 years in office, the riding seemed up for grabs this election.

In comparison, in 2019 Helwer won the seat with 58.4 per cent of the vote, compared to NDP candidate Nick Brown who gathered 23.8 per cent, the Green Party’s Robert Brown with 10.1 per cent and Liberal Sunday Frangi who had 7.7 per cent.

When asked whether he thought negative ads run by the PC party had anything to do with the closeness of the race in Brandon West, Balcaen said he doesn’t know how the ads affected voting but believes the PC candidates in his riding and neighbouring Brandon East and Spruce Woods ran a clean and professional campaign.

“None of my social media feeds would have had that in it because I didn’t want to have that sort of election,” Balcaen said. “I said that from day one with my team.”

The PCs as a whole were dogged throughout the campaign by accusations they were playing American-style wedge politics, in particular surrounding party leader Heather Stefanson’s refusal to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women believed to have been murdered.

On Sept. 23, the party ran a provocative full-page newspaper ad in the Winnipeg Free Press and The Brandon Sun that promoted the decision not to search the landfill. It was followed by billboard ads stating the party would “stand firm” against the search.

The PCs also ran a “Don’t gamble on the NDP” attack ad that featured photos of NDP Leader Wab Kinew and other NDP candidates as “wild cards” and made sensational accusations against them.

Those accusations included a reference to Kinew’s past in which he faced criminal charges. Kinew received pardons for impaired driving and assault convictions from 20 years ago. He’d also faced assault charges that were stayed by the Crown.

Given the drawn out process of counting votes, The Brandon Sun wasn’t able to provide full election coverage. The newspaper will follow up with further coverage in Thursday’s edition.

» ihitchen@brandonsun.com