5 Manitoba takeaways from the 2025 federal election

With the 2025 federal election in the rear-view mirror, the Liberals remain in power, the Conservatives remain in Opposition and the New Democrats have been reduced to seven seats.

Now that these results are clear, it's time to consider what happened in Manitoba on a more granular basis:

On the eve of the election, Winnipeg West was one of two Manitoba ridings where an incumbent was in danger of losing.

This wasn't based on any hunch. Just arithmetic.

In the 2021 election, Conservative Marty Morantz beat Liberal Doug Eyolfson by 460 votes, which worked out to a one percentage point margin in a riding then called Charles-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley.

This mirrored the national support for their respective parties in that election. Nationwide in 2021, the Conservatives edged the Liberals, 33.7 per cent to 32.6 per cent.

The NDP, meanwhile, was the party of choice for 17.8 per cent of Canadians in the 2021 election.

The widespread belief going into the 2025 election was any significant swell in Liberal support would allow Eyolfson to overtake Morantz. The Conservative campaign in Winnipeg, led by experienced organizers Michael Kowalson and Tannis Drysdale, was aware it had to run a superior ground game in order to nullify a modest Liberal lead in popular support.

On election night, however, the NDP vote collapsed to 6.3 per cent nationally and only four per cent in Winnipeg West, according to Elections Canada.

That allowed Eyolfson to blow past Morantz by more than 7,000 votes and a nearly 14 percentage point margin. 

In effect, two out of every three NDP voters in 2021 jumped ship to the Liberals in Winnipeg West. Even Manitoba's greatest ground game couldn't stop that train.

The other Winnipeg incumbent to lose a seat on election night was the NDP's Leila Dance in Elmwood-Transcona. She was hoping to edge past Conservative Colin Reynolds for the second time in seven months.

In the September byelection, Dance earned 48 per cent of the vote in Elmwood-Transcona, while Reynolds received 44 per cent. Less than five per cent of the vote went to Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre.

Part of the poor Liberal showing in that byelection was the result of the extreme unpopularity of Justin Trudeau's Liberals. Strategic voting likely played a role as well, especially because byelection voters tend to be more engaged and motivated than voters in general elections.