ANALYSIS: Manitoba Liberals could be the key in historic provincial election

Both PC Leader Heather Stefanson and NDP Leader Wab Kinew are looking to make history on Oct. 3. But it could be Manitoba Liberals who decide which one of them moves forward.

Manitoba’s 43rd provincial election will officially get underway in the week ahead and when it concludes on Oct. 3, voters will have made history no matter if the incumbent Progressive Conservatives win or the opposition New Democrats sweep to power.

If the PCs prevail, Heather Stefanson will have become the first woman in the province’s history to lead her party to victory in a general election. She is already the province’s first female premier, having notched that accomplishment when she won her party’s leadership after Brian Pallister resigned in 2021.

If the New Democrats form government, its leader, Wab Kinew, will become the first provincial premier in the country’s history who is an Indigenous person. (The country’s territories have had Indigenous premiers but no province has ever been led by an Indigenous person.)

This is Kinew’s second election as leader of his party and until the beginning of the summer, it looked like Manitobans would indeed make Kinew the next premier. But the only two public polls taken since the end of May show that Stefanson’s PCs have closed whatever gap existed.

But this is not a two-party race. Far from it.

Both the Manitoba Liberals and the Manitoba Greens have had decent showings in the last two elections and the decisions this year to be made by previous supporters of those two parties — the Liberals in particular — could be decisive.

In 2019, more than 69,000 voted for a Manitoba Liberal candidate — about 14 per cent of the popular vote province-wide but nearly 19 per cent of the vote in Winnipeg. Just under 30,000 Manitobans voted Green, representing 6.4 per cent province-wide and 7.3 per cent in the capital.

Four years ago, the NDP fought the PCs to a near draw in Winnipeg’s 32 seats with the PCs taking 15 districts on 36.5 per cent of the popular vote in the capital to the NDP’s 14 seats on 36 per cent of the vote. The Liberals wound up with three seats in the capital.