Don’t read too much into byelection results

When cold-warring political parties like Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats have an opportunity to drop the gloves in a byelection, as was the case here in Spruce Woods this summer, there is always a danger in reading too much — or even too little — into the results.

They may try to deny it, but it is nevertheless true that news media and politicos of all stripes love a good horse race. There’s always some money involved, often a little political intrigue, and there are always reputations on the line.

And so a byelection result is often picked apart and studied like a cup of tea leaves — what does the outcome mean? Part of the problem is that a byelection is merely a snapshot — a moment in time in a highly localized region, often with very specific conditions — that can sometimes give parties an inflated sense of broader political trends.

And it must be said that the conditions in play during the Spruce Woods byelection will likely never come again — at least not to the same degree.

Think of the situation the province was in at the time. For most of the summer, Manitoba has been in the middle of a state of emergency that was implemented by the province as a result of the raging wildfires in northern Manitoba.

The Progressive Conservatives, fresh off a leadership race earlier this year, had in place a new and untested leader in Obby Khan, who had only taken the reins of the party by the skin of his teeth. His fellow candidate for the leadership, Wally Daudrich, claimed 53 more votes than Khan, but ultimately lost the leadership based on the party’s recently adopted points system. The new system was designed to prevent candidates from winning the leadership by potentially flooding one or two constituencies with new membership sales, according to a report by The Canadian Press.

What the leadership race did, however, was confirm that the party remained heavily divided going into this byelection.

Also recall that Daudrich mused openly about running for a seat in Spruce Woods, where Grant Jackson had at the time recently vacated his seat to run for the federal Brandon-Souris riding. Multiple party sources had told the Sun that, along with Daudrich, Colleen Robbins and Scott Phillips had submitted applications — or at least were interested. But with Daudrich saying he hadn’t submitted any application, and Phillips backing away from the prospect, Robbins was approved as the Tory candidate without ever having faced a nomination race.

On the other side of the aisle, you’ve got the NDP, which ran a stand-in candidate — Melissa Ghidoni — during the 2023 general election in Spruce Woods. Ghidoni was largely missing from the campaign trail in that election, refused to speak to media for an interview and failed to show up for the official Brandon Sun-Brandon University candidates debate that took place that year.

How an authentic NDP candidacy would have fared in that election is impossible to gauge, but as a result of that failure to connect in the riding two years ago, 2025 byelection candidate Ray Berthelette was essentially burdened by the ghost of a non-campaign — or not burdened at all, depending on how you look at it.

And like the Tories, Berthelette, too, had no nomination challenger, and he himself said that he would have stepped aside if another candidate had both shown interest and been greenlit by the party.

Questions began to swirl in July about when Premier Wab Kinew would announce the writ drop for the Spruce Woods byelection, even as it was becoming clear that the premier had the electoral district in his sights. By July 10, Kinew was openly denying that three large funding announcements made in Spruce Woods that month totalling more than $17 million were connected to the coming byelection.

“I’m going to work hard to make life better for everybody in Manitoba, and so we’ll do that all the time, whether or not there’s a byelection looming,” Kinew said during one of those announcements.

Ultimately, the NDP government announced or re-announced more than $334 million in funding for projects in and around Spruce Woods in the lead-up to the start of the race.

And when the race finally began, the NDP were not content to merely run on the graces of Ray Berthelette — the premier himself pulled out all the stops in the race, personally visiting communities and knocking on doors for days at a time.

Winnipeg-based reporters were openly musing to Sun staff at one point that they were in political withdrawal because the premier was spending so much time in Westman. This, even in the middle of a provincial state of emergency. It’s very clear that Kinew wanted to win Spruce Woods, and he did everything he could to try to pull it off.

There are a few possible ways to view this byelection, and they both depend upon your political viewpoint.

From the Tory perspective, you can argue that even with all of the money pumped into the region before the byelection, the star power of a popular premier and the rather large political gaffes that Robbins stumbled with, the NDP were unable to pull out a win in the region.

In the NDP camp, the party came within 70 votes of taking away a longtime Progressive Conservative stronghold, thanks in large part to the star power of a popular premier. And as a result, the Tories better be looking over their shoulder come the next election.

So much of it comes down to partisan cherry-picking, and the reality is likely somewhere in the middle. Without doubt, however, the political environment in October 2027 will look quite a bit different than the summer of 2025 that has just passed.

And all our pontification and tea-leaf reading will be lost in the woods.