The party’s campaign manager, Jeremy Read, said modern politics is leadership-focused.
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The election saw Manitoba’s NDP decimated by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives, leaving the PCs to take power for the first time in 16 years and form a colossal majority government with 40 of the province’s 57 seats.
National NDP leader Thomas Muclair was recently voted out by the party. The party has lost the last three provincial elections, its share of the popular vote shrinking each time.
NDP Leader Greg Selinger won his riding of St. Boniface and was greeted by a jubilant crowd at RBC Convention Centre, despite his party’s loss.
The NDP had been low in opinion polls since the sales tax hike, and a rebellion by five cabinet ministers in 2014 didn’t help.
At the final leaders debate, Pallister suggested the province was being run by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and assured people that would change if his party took power. The Tories swept southern and central Manitoba and picked up a number of ridings in Winnipeg.
“I’m probably a workaholic, and I work every day at what I do, and I work hard, but I also want to protect my family’s privacy and that balance”, Pallister said, at a news conference.
Selinger announced he will step down as leader, and Notley said his impact will be missed, particularly at first ministers’ meetings.
Thus ends the tenure of the last Canadian regime that’s been in power since the 1990s.
She said that hope hinged on Selinger being “the one person (people) can count on to ensure that health care is still going to operate the way it needs, that services are going to be delivered and they’re not going to be cut”.
Selinger came into the election on the back of a broken promise; he said during the 2011 election campaign there would be no new taxes, then went ahead and raised the provincial sales tax two years later.
As with the born-in-1970s dynasty that fell in Alberta last spring, Greg Selinger’s government collapsed under its own clunking weight.
“I think the unpopularity of Mr. Selinger is much more important to understanding the outcome than Mr. Pallister’s popularity”.
Tuesday’s defeat is only the latest in a string of electoral disasters for a party that finds itself needing to rebuild across the country.
She said Nova Scotia has evolved into a “strong three-party system”, and that the fortunes of the NDP – which spent a term in government before falling to the Liberals in the last election – will depend on how clearly it presents its message. He didn’t have to promise the moon to win – he didn’t even set a timeline for balanced budget, waiting to see how the NDP left the provincial books.
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Pallister also says he’s eager to join a trade agreement with the other western provinces with the aim of breaking down trade barriers and creating jobs.
