Scott Gillingham pulls off mayoral win with smallest vote share in Winnipeg's modern history
CBC
Scott Gillingham never came close to surpassing Glen Murray in any of the opinion polls throughout Winnipeg's 2022 mayoral campaign.
But in the end, the two-term councillor with the fully costed platform defeated the former Winnipeg mayor with a grandiose vision, but a work record that raised questions.
In an election campaign that offered voters an array of ambitious and even innovative ideas to solve the city's problems from 11 candidates, voters chose the one who appeared to offer the most realistic and meticulously detailed platform on Wednesday night.
The chair of the University of Winnipeg's politics department says he was "not entirely surprised by the results."
"The few polls that were made public" in the campaign's last weeks "suggested that Glen Murray had sort of hit a plateau, and we saw other candidates that were surging," said Aaron Moore.
"There were so many undecided voters too, that there was a possibility for a candidate like Scott Gillingham to pick up and surpass Glen Murray."
From the moment Murray — who served as Winnipeg's mayor from 1998 to 2004 — entered the mayoral campaign, he remained the odds-on favourite to win, according to polls.
The earliest poll in the campaign, released in the middle of summer, gave Murray a seemingly insurmountable lead, with 44 per cent of decided voters saying they favoured him — 28 points ahead of Gillingham, who sat in second place.
That lead appeared to erode over the course of the campaign, as Murray fell to 28 per cent in an October poll commissioned by Gillingham's campaign.
According to unofficial results from the City of Winnipeg, Gillingham ultimately pulled in the support of 27.54 per cent of voters on Wednesday to Murray's 25.29 per cent — a split of just 2.25 percentage points, making it the closest mayoral race since 1977.
Gillingham's share of the vote is also the lowest popular vote percentage of any mayor in recent memory. Susan Thompson had the second-lowest percentage, with 38.3 per cent in her 1995 win.
And with voter turnout at 37 per cent, Gillingham has one of the weakest mandates in modern Winnipeg history.
Murray's fall in the polls followed a series of critical stories about his time as leader of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based clean energy think-tank. Former employees alleged sexual harassment, poor management and chaotic behaviour by Murray, who worked with the institute in 2017 and 2018.
"I'm sure some of the allegations against Glen Murray impacted his support," said Moore. "It may be that voters didn't go to Scott Gillingham. They might have gone to another candidate, but I'm sure that did have some impact."
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch is looking for 50 substitute bus drivers, and it'll be recruiting at three job fairs on Saturday, June 8. The job fairs are located at the Atlantic Superstore in Montague, Royalty Crossing in Charlottetown, and the bus parking lot of Three Oaks Senior High in Summerside. All three run from 9 a.m. until noon. Dave Gillis, the director of transportation and risk management for the Public Schools Branch, said the number of substitute drivers they're hiring isn't unusual. "We are always looking for more. Our drivers tend to have an older demographic," he said.