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Canada Election Files; Manitoba & Quebec [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-16  

October saw two Provincial elections including the full Manitoba Provincial election and a byelection in Quebec. First Manitoba which saw a victory for the NDP over the Conservative government. As always expect a long article with plenty of Canadian context type stuff.

Manitoba is the easternmost (or as they would prefer to say; central Canadian) Prairie Province but it differs from it's two fellow prairie neighbours Alberta and Saskatchewan in not being an oil producer. Instead Manitoba's economy remains that of the pre-petro Prairies in having one large city (Winnipeg) with the south and central areas being rural farmland and the far north sparsely populated wilderness. The closest American comparison would be states like Kansas or Nebraska albeit with a much larger city and assuming they had a upstate area resembling northern Minnesota only colder and with way more Native people. Thus politically Manitoba differs in being more swingy than their Tory petro-state neighbours with their well funded domineering Conservative parties rarely having to worry about losing power. Instead Manitoba has alternated between Tory and NDP governments since the seventies with most getting reelected at least once. Besides the lack of big oil money the main difference and defining factor in Manitoba politics is the dominance of it's one large city. The greater Winnipeg Area actually accounts for almost two thirds of the entire population if one includes various satellite cities. In fact Winnipeg is so dominant that the next largest city (Brandon) is a mere tenth of the size of Winnipeg and the next largest cities are only half the size of Brandon and are are really just large towns. Accordingly Manitoba politics are usually pretty straightforward with the Tories easily winning the rural central and southern areas while the NDP winning the city core and the even more wilderness far north with it's largely native population and elections then being decided in the Winnipeg suburbs and satellite cities and the two seats in Brandon.

The Conservative Party has been in power since the 2016 victory under Brian Pallister who served two tumultuous terms full of austerity and gaffes before resigning in 2021 and being replaced by Heather Stefanson as the first female Premier. Manitoba Tories tend to be rather more moderate than their more loudly rightwing neighbours, especially when running for office, accordingly Stefanson started out promising to restore healthcare and education funding. However lagging in the polls Stefenson made a tack to the right to run on culture war rhetoric about crime, "parental rights" (ie anti-trans) and an inexplicable opposition to allowing an investigation to a dig at a possible unmarked grave at a former Indian residential school that even the police thought warranted. The focus on crime and dismissal of Native issues were not subtle attempts to exploit the presumed weaknesses of NDP leader Wab Kinew.

Kinew, a former rapper, writer and CBC journalist is also the first Native leader of a major political party in Canada outside of the the far Northern Territories (Note; 1870's Manitoba Premier John Norquay was also Metis). Natives in Canada are subject to some of the same racist tropes aimed at black people in America; Namely that they are lazy and prone to drunkenness and criminality so encouraging divisive rhetoric on native issues and focusing on crime was an obvious attempt to bring attention to Kinew being Native without actually saying so. It was also an even less subtle attempt to exploit Kinew's own chequered past. Kinew has admitted that prior to entering politics he had a drinking problem with arrests for DUI's, assaults and domestic battery. Kinew went into rehab, quit drinking and was granted a pardon in 2015 but not surprisingly his past has been an issue ever since. The NDP is traditionally roughly the Canadian descendent of the UK Labour Party but in practice it has been more centrist and this is especially true in the Western Provinces where the Liberal Parties have been reduced to minor party status as here or are moribund. Accordingly the Manitoba NDP has generally run moderate platforms which promises good government and investing more in government programs and infrastructure while keeping taxes and deficits low.

Unlike the other Western Provinces, Manitoba does have an active if small Liberal Party which is somewhat competitive in spite of it's erratic history. The Liberals haven't actually held power since 1958 and traditionally had been the establishment party and often to the right of the national Liberals with one of it's leaders (John Bracken) becoming the (unsuccessful) leader of the federal Tories in the forties and another (the last Liberal Premier, Bennett Campbell) bitterly feuding with the Federal party in the fifties and much later joining a far right populist party. However since the 1990's the Liberals have focused entirely on their base in the Winnipeg suburbs, immigrant communities and federal workers and have sometimes even run to the left of the NDP on funding and environmental issues. The Liberals often do well in the polls sometimes polling ahead of the NDP and even occasionally leading but during actual elections the results are always the same; they only manage to elect three or four members as they simply do not have the infrastructure to recruit enough good candidates or get out the vote. The one exception being in 1988 when they shocked everybody, including themselves, by coming within a few seats of actually winning. After that they quickly collapsed due to infighting (another chronic problem with Western Liberals) and in the next election were reduced to their usual handful where they have remained ever since. Going into this election they held three seats under leader Dougald Lamont and as usual had high hopes of doubling their seats and becoming kingmakers of a minority government, presumably NDP since he made it implicitly clear that they would be unlikely to prop up the Tories.

A final note on two lesser parties. The Greens have never elected anybody but they are stronger here than in the other two prairie provinces (that's a very low bar) and like the Liberals often poll well enough that they they too went into this election hoping to get a seat for a breakthrough. Again like the Liberals their base is in the Winnipeg suburbs and student voters where both parties can take away enough votes from the NDP to be an annoyance. On the far right Manitoba has it's obligatory populist party in the rural Keystone Party however they have yet to find any of the traction such parties have found in the other western provinces and could round up only five rural candidates and so the Tories tack to the right to apparently placate their voters puzzled most observers who felt it unnecessary.

At the last election the results were; Conservatives - 34 seats, NDP - 18 and the Liberals with 3 with 29 seats needed for a majority. The results for October 6 were;

Wab Kinew - NDP - 34 seats - 45.5%

Heather Stefanson - Conservatives - 22 seats - 42%

Dougald Lamont - Liberals - 1 seat - 11%

Janine Gibson - Greens - 0 seats

Polls had been showing the NDP with a clear lead for over a year and in the event the NDP gained fourteen points for a convincing victory which almost swept the Winnipeg suburbs at the expense of both the Tories and Liberals almost exactly flipping the results from the previous election. (Note; The NDP also won one of the two seats in Brandon which when announced on the big screen led to delighted chants of “Lets Go Brandon” because why not?). In the closing weeks in a clear sign of desperation the Tories floated some Trumpist election denial theories about Dominion voting machines (Canada uses paper ballots but the votes are counted by machine) and labour unions doing something, something fraud and running a bizarre ad that seemed to imply that Tories were afraid their vote might be spied on in the voting booth. Many nationwide observers on the left heaved a sigh of relief that the Tories having a campaign with hateful rhetoric and conspiracies ended up losing but more sober (or somber) observers pointed out that the election was still fairly close and they still kept much of their base and this appears to be another example of conservative parties easily winning the rural areas while bleeding votes from the educated suburbs that we've seen in Canada, the US and Australia. Kinew becomes the first fully First Nations (the Canadian term for Native peoples) Premier in Canada outside the Far Northern Territories. Stefanson announced her resignation as Tory Leader leaving an open question as to what direction the party will go as the wipeout of most of their more moderate suburban caucus leaves the remaining members from the rural wing. Assuming she resigns her suburban seat that will force a byelection is a seat she won only narrowly by less than three hundred votes. As for the Liberals, Leader Lamont lost his seat and also resigned leaving the sole remaining member Cindy Lamoureaux the presumed next leader. Lamoureaux is in fact the last remaining Provincial Liberal of any kind left standing between the Great Lakes and the Pacific since the floundering BC Liberals officially changed their name earlier this year (Note; aside from tiny Yukon which does have a Liberal government) leading to the usual very pundity pundits speculating about their likely demise but the Manitoba Liberals are nothing if not persistent and while they lost two of their seats Lamoureaux actually gained votes in her riding. Also unlike their former BC cousins the Manitoba Liberals have a close relationship with the Federal party who have a strong presence in Winnipeg and her father Kevin is a Liberal MP. Besides the experience of the BC Liberals should give pause about also giving up the name. After badly losing the last election the BC Liberals changed their name this year to BC United and the result was an immediate and dramatic nosedive in the polls with them now in third place to the despised BC Conservatives who have literally not elected anybody since the early 70's. It would seem the Liberal brand, no matter how tarnished out west, is still worth something. As for the Greens they are used to disappointment but the failure of the yet another far right party shows the waning limits of such parties in Canada or the success of the Tory parties to co-opt their vote. Probably the latter. This win makes Manitoba currently the second Province with an NDP government (after BC) with the Liberals in power in only the small Newfoundland and tiny Yukon on opposite ends of the country while the other seven have various strains of Conservative governments. When the Federal Liberals won power in 2016 provincially there were seven Liberal governments, two NDP and two Conservatives.

QUEBEC; JEAN-TALON BYELECTION;

The resignation of a sitting MLA led to a byelection the riding of Jean-Talon held by the ruling CAQ party. The riding in the Quebec City capital had been a traditional Liberal stronghold from 1966 onward prior to the CAQ winning it in 2019 although the basic Federal equivalent riding has been more swingy. Quebec differs from the rest of Canada in having entirely different parties aside from the Liberals. The CAQ (Coalition Avenir Quebec) is a conservative party which did not exist prior to 2011 although it is essentially a carry-over from a previous similar party the ADQ which had been around since 1994, (Quebec parties are known for their often fly-by-night lifespan and Byzantine infighting and factionalism with only the Liberals existing before the late sixties) but under the leadership of François Legault the CAQ have won landslide victories in 2018 and 2022 with a coalition of federal Conservatives, disgruntled Liberals and what in Quebec are called "soft nationalists", meaning white Francophones who support "Provincial Rights" but balk at full blown separatism. The CAQ easily won reelection in 2022 even gaining fourteen seats with the assumption they could easily stay in power for years and they still post double digit leads in the polls but they have become increasingly arrogant and high-handed in power and angered locals by promising to build to build a bridge in the last election, then reneging once they won.

The opposition Liberals would normally be favoured to win back a riding they had previously held since 1966 but they have been seriously weakened since their glory days in power of only a decade ago. The Liberals have traditionally been the go-to party for Anglophones, multi-cultural communities and immigrants (known collectively as Allophones), federal Liberals and civil servants, the business elite and staunch federalists, but the success of the CAQ of luring away rural and suburban voters along with the business elite while keeping the separatist rhetoric at bay has reduced the Liberals to their base of Anglo and Allophones in the city of Montreal where their remaining nineteen seats are. Montreal is by far Quebec's largest city but it is also substantially different from the rest of the Province in being heavily bilingual and multi-cultural compared with the almost entirely white and French rest of the Province (with the notable exception of Hull, a small city across the river from Ottawa which is thus essentially a suburb of the capital) thus it has not hard to encourage resentment towards the "Liberal Montreal Elites". In fact the recently resigned Liberal leader Dominque Anglade was a Haitian immigrant and the first black woman to lead a party in Canada. After the disastrous last election loss the Liberals are currently without a leader and divided between their normal technocrat business class leadership who embraced austerity light while in power and younger members eager to move to the left and have have been languishing in the polls with some showing them in third or even fourth place and in March they lost a byelection to the CAQ in a riding held by their previous leader after she resigned. The basic Federal equivalent riding is currently held by the Liberals since 2015.

The Liberal's traditional rivals had been the Parti Quebecois (PQ), a separatist party, had been languishing even longer than the Liberals having been reduced to ten seats in the last election but the inability of the Liberals to exploit any fatigue of the CAQ in the hinterlands has allowed the PQ to rebuild and they have been polling in second place for months outside Montreal. From it's founding in the 1960's under the leadership of Rene Levesque the PQ had been a rickety but successful combination of urban leftist and radical union voters and conservative rural nationalists with Levesque (a former Liberal) solidly on the moderate left however in the 2000's the PQ took a dramatic lurch to the right and now more resembles the French Front Nationale of the Le Pen's as a stridently ethnic nationalist and anti immigrant party. The PQ's embrace of the right led to an exodus of younger urban supporters who founded the leftist Quebec Solidaire (QS) who are easily the most left-wing elected party in Canada, to the left of both the NDP and the Greens neither of which have any real place in Quebec. In fact attempts to start a Quebec NDP have always been embarrassing failures with the current version not even bothering to run any candidates in the last election nor in this one. QS is a proudly socialist, nominally separatist party with a base largely limited to certain areas of Montreal and university campuses which has been enough to win them a beachhead of eleven seats that they have been hoping to expand on and an urban seat in the Provincial capital gave them a possible opening. In the 2022 election for this riding (which the CAQ won) QS actually finished a strong second. This being Quebec the Greens have always been prone to factionalism between Federalists, Separatists and eco purists who curse both sides leading to a rival green party in Climat Quebec which is explicitly separatist. There is also a Quebec Conservative Party which has been trying to gain traction. Originally when the CAQ swept out the Liberals in 2018 there was much gloating from the Federal Conservatives over the defeat of their hated Liberal rivals by a nominally conservative party seen as an ally. However while in office Leagault has shown little interest in feuding with the Trudeau government, supported vaccine mandates, refused to endorse the Federal Tories in two elections and what's even more unforgivable the CAQ have opposed the Tories' pro-pipeline policies and climate change denialism conspiracy theories. In fact opposition to pipelines and a belief in climate change is possibly the only thing all parties in Quebec agree on and since the Tories are explicitly a Petro Party naturally they decided to start their own Provincial party which has shown little traction. During the course of the campaign all the major parties had reasonable hopes of winning however by the end polls suprisingly the showed the PQ in the lead.



Results;

Parti Quebecois (PQ) - Pascal Paradis - 11,307 - 44%

CAQ - Marie-Anik Shoiry - 5,474 - 21%

Quebec Solidaire - Oliver Bolduc - 4,491 - 17.5%

Liberals - Elise Avard Bernier - 2,270 - 9%

Conservatives - Jesse Robitaille - 1,558 - 6%

Climat Quebec - Martine Oulett - 308 - 1%

Greens - Kadidia Mahamane Bamba - 152 - 0.5%

The victory for the PQ in a riding they have literally never come close to winning (although their Federal cousins the BQ have won the equivalent riding) comes as upset leaving many questions for it's ramifications. This is the first loss for the CAQ since sweeping the Province in 2018 and even though they have a huge majority and are still riding high in the polls a revived PQ could be a threat in their former heartland which also tends to be much of the CAQ's current heartland. At this point it's unclear if this unexpected win is in fact a potential revival (they last held power in 2014) or just a protest vote but a potential return to power would also mean a return to the constitutional brinksmanship of the PQ years as their campaign platform still promises another independence referendum in a first term, something polls have consistently shown little public appetite for over the past twenty years and which the CAQ is explicitly opposed to as are of course the Liberals. Meanwhile the Liberal's continued humiliation show the party in the doldrums with no obvious leaders and unsure of what it's core policies even are. As the only go-to party for staunch Federalists, Anglos and Allophones the Liberals do still have a floor of die-hard seats in Montreal who would never dream of voting for another party and certainly not the loathed separatist PQ or QS that should give them a floor beyond which they probably can not fall but it's unclear how they move beyond that to regain the heartland votes they lost to the CAQ without which they can only be regional party. Similarly the QS also remain in effect a regional Montreal party albeit one with a far more clear identity. The Quebec Conservatives lack even that and have no particular reason for existing and it wouldn't be a surprise if they end up disappearing as it wouldn't even be the first time that's happened in Quebec and it won’t be the last.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/16/2199760/-Canada-Election-Files-Manitoba-Quebec?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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