While most eyes were turned to mere primaries in New York Tuesday night, a territory almost five times the size of New York changed hands politically. The ruling liberal party was shown the door and conservatives won a majority, and a record-breaking one at that, for the first time since 1999.
Why haven’t you heard of it?
Because that territory wasn’t in the United States of America, but in Canada.
Just months after the Conservative Party went down to defeat in Canada to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, they’ve come roaring back at the local level in the prairie province of Manitoba. Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative Party got 40 seats in the 57-seat provincial parliament, the NDP got 14 and the Liberals 3.
They won the election not because Canada’s two leftwing parties, the Liberals and the NDP, created a vote split, but by winning an outright majority. The last time any conservative government in the province did that was over 100 years ago.
Does that win signal discontent with Trudeau, perhaps even trouble? The Washington Examiner put that question to Paul Tuns, author of a critical biography about Trudeau called “The Dauphin.”
Tuns responded with some skepticism initially, saying he was “not sure if the Manitoba election had anything to do with the Trudeau government in Ottawa.” He would pin the victory more on “the unpopularity of the NDP in the province.”
However, Tuns argued, this could be an election with national implications.
“What this election does indicate,” Tuns said, “is that contra the narrative just a few months ago, Canada is not uniformly Liberal.”
After the victory of Trudeau, the young party leader and son of the late four-term Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Tuns said, “the media focused on the fact that the Conservative/Progressive Conservative brand had not one government in Canada at the federal or provincial level.”
This narrative unfortunately “ignored the fact that the Saskatchewan Party was in government right next door to Manitoba and that the Liberals in British Columbia and Quebec are not the same as their federal cousins and attract plenty of conservative-minded provincial voters.”
Tuns sees the conservative victory in Manitoba as a warning that “if the pendulum was swinging left after the Trudeau victory last October, it doesn’t mean it will swing left always and everywhere.”
“What matters now politically,” Tuns said, “is that [Saskatchewan Premier] Brad Wall could have a potential ally in pushing back against the Trudeau government as it attempts to foist its far-left agenda on the provinces, especially in the environmental file.
“Negotiations between Ottawa and the provinces won’t necessarily be Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall vs. Trudeau and his Liberal allies. It could be Wall and newly elected Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister vs. the Liberals. That’s a fairer fight.”
