When a federal by-election was held in the southern Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar in 2023, there was little doubt that the Conservative Party of Canada would retain the deeply conservative seat.
Nevertheless, the Conservatives poured money and resources into this election in a concerted effort to snuff out any political spark that remained in the minds of Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party of Canada.
The strategy worked: Conservative candidate Brandon Leslie won 65 percent of the popular vote, while Bernier received just 17 percent in one of the few constituencies in Canada considered friendly to his populist conservatism.
Attacks from the right are no longer a threat to the Conservative Party.
In this week’s Manitoba by-election, the Conservatives employed another unconventional strategy.
They sought to retake the Elmwood-Transcona riding in eastern Winnipeg, which has belonged to the NDP for all but four years since its founding, by firmly acknowledging in voters the two-year governing agreement between the New Democrats and the unpopular ruling Liberal Party.
For much of the summer, Conservative election posters in the district have shown NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh calling him “traitor Singh” and shaking hands with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Conservative strategy was clear: attack the New Democrats, who have always been supported by many of Winnipeg’s east-eastern voters, by attacking the Liberals, who have never enjoyed more than moderate support in that corner of the city, even more harshly.
Lois Koop, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this month that the strategy of aligning one party against another was a novel one.
“The Liberal party is very unpopular. They’re certainly not competitive in that constituency,” so trying to pair the NDP with the Liberals “makes some sense,” he said.
“But it doesn’t always seem that way.”
After what happened at Elmwood Transcona on Monday night, we may never see it again.
If the strategy is too successful
When the final votes were tallied on by-election night, NDP candidate Leila Dance had won 48 per cent of the popular vote, beating her Conservative rival Colin Reynolds by four points.
Liberal candidate Ian McIntyre received 5 per cent of the popular vote.
This proved to be a disaster for the Conservatives, especially considering that Liberal candidates in Elmwood-Transcona had won between 12 and 30 percent of the vote in the electorate in the past three general elections.
On Monday, the Liberal vote share in the Elmwood-Transcona riding suffered its steepest drop since 2011, with the NDP’s Dance beating the Conservative Reynolds by 1,158 votes.
This is not because the Conservative Party’s electoral strategy has failed; if anything, it seems to have been too successful.
It’s entirely possible that Pierre Poirievre’s party has succeeded in reminding voters in constituencies where the Liberals hold little appeal that most of them really do dislike Trudeau and his party right now.
It’s not easy for staunchly center-left voters to switch from the NDP to the Conservatives, and yet the Conservative campaign seems to be doing all it can to convince voters who virtually never vote Conservative that the Liberals are not their best political choice right now.
It appears that some of the Liberal and New Democrat swing voters voted orange instead of red – enough to allow the New Democrats to retain Elmwood-Transcona.
Even if the Conservatives were to once again face a two-way election battle with the NDP, it is doubtful this third-party strategy would be repeated.
Liberals are more unpopular than the carbon tax
At this point, one might wonder why the Conservatives took this gamble. The simplest explanation is that it may not have seemed like a gamble to them.
Poiriervre has won huge support among staunchly Conservative voters by promising to repeal the carbon tax, a key Liberal policy. What Conservative strategists may have overlooked are other reasons why Canadian voters are losing support for the Liberal party.
The Aga Khan’s visit. The costumed visit to India. Gropgate. Blackface. SNC-Lavalin. WE Charity. Chinese interference. The ArriveCan app. Reichstag members. The housing crisis. This is a partial list, in roughly chronological order.
Conservative election ads aimed at Singh in the Elmwood-Transcona district only mentioned the carbon tax, which will resonate with Conservative voters but not with Liberal or New Democrat swing voters.
It is fair to assume that other factors influenced Dance’s victory. Singh’s decision to terminate the confidence and supply agreement during the by-election campaign could not have adversely affected Dance’s victory.
But the Conservative campaign’s decision to keep Reynolds away from debates and interviews with reporters — standard practice for Conservative candidates in the Poirievre era — probably wouldn’t have had any impact.
In the next general election, the Elmwood-Transcona County boundary will move east to encompass the Dougald area, and based on polling data for the 2021 election, the Conservatives should gain a few hundred more votes east of the Red River floodway.
That alone doesn’t guarantee a win for the blue team in Elmwood-Transcona: Dance has entrenched himself as the incumbent, and the NDP has fewer defensive and offensive fronts in Manitoba (four in total, including three incumbents and an attempt to take Winnipeg North from the Liberals) than the Conservatives (who control seven of Manitoba’s 14 districts and will likely target others).
The methods for winning close elections — going door-to-door to identify friendly voters and get them to vote on Election Day — are hardly new.
