Ode to the losers: Local riding candidates among best in decades

Midway through the campaign, in front of a university crowd not inclined to love a Tory, Audrey Gordon faced two questions every Progressive Conservative candidate dreads. Is your leader opposed to gay rights? And what will a PC government do about increasing access to abortion?

Gordon handled both questions like a pro.

She said, in her experience with PC leader Brian Pallister, he'd been nothing but tolerant and open-minded. And she said abortion would be treated like any other health service to which Manitobans are entitled.

What could have been a touchy moment replete with boos instead evaporated.

Gordon, a civil servant who has worked on everything from immigrant resettlement to on-reserve kidney disease, lived up to her reputation as an excellent candidate in the Fort Rouge riding.

Tuesday night, she was among dozens of excellent candidates who lost.

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Unless they do something silly (like claim a pledge to mothball hospitals was just a publicity stunt), local candidates rarely get the attention they deserve, beyond a rushed riding profile and a chance to stand quietly behind their leader at a photo-op.

Instead, campaigns are dominated by the daily doings of those leaders – their gaffes and photo-ops and policy musings and kitchen table tax returns.

The leaders seemed to dominate the campaign even more this year, even though Manitobans didn't much like any of them.

A Probe Research poll done about three weeks before the vote revealed a strong "none of the above" sentiment among voters when asked which leader was most trusted.

Voters trusted the three parties far more than they trusted each leader – Pallister, Liberal leader Rana Bokhari and NDP leader Greg Selinger.

Anecdotally, I lost count how many times I heard friends say they didn't want to vote for any of them, a sentiment reinforced by Tuesday night's tepid turnout.

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But, in a fairly ridiculous campaign that saw schoolyard sniping trump real policy debates, the one bright spot was the army of local candidates in individual ridings, maybe the best I've seen in a dozen elections I've watched.

There were poverty activists, small business owners, union leaders, restaurateurs, data experts, meteorologists, child welfare advocates and even a roller-derby athlete.

And those were just the losers.

There were more women, more people of colour and more indigenous candidates this year.

They started earlier, especially the PC candidates, most of whom were nominated months in advance.

Armed with little policy to offer at the door — because there wasn't much — the candidates spent rainy, cold days canvassing.

They begged friends and family for help and cash at a time when few Manitobans appeared very excited about the campaign, and a great many of them persevered while their central campaign was imploding or while their leader was despised.

Fine Liberal candidates like photographer Ian McCausland in Assiniboia or transgender activist Shandi Strong in Wolseley would have watched as Bokhari's pledges were picked apart, her campaign operation became a punchline and the party's hopes of a 1988-style underdog surge largely evaporated.

Then they would have had to keep their chins up for another day of door-knocking.

And, equally fine NDP candidates like Jamie Moses would have heard, at door after door in St. Vital, something like, "You seem like a lovely guy, but Selinger has just got to go."

Political scientists will say the local candidate matters to just five per cent of voters, and the quality of the local candidate only has a small effect on the outcome in a riding.

A small effect can be all a party needs in a tight race, but mostly it's only political nerds who fixate on the minutia of who is running where.

That's a shame in any election, but maybe more so this time, during a campaign that did little to elevate the province's political discourse or honour the time and effort spent by a bunch of decent Manitobans who make democracy work, riding by riding.

Now, they'll return to their jobs as PhDs or respiratory therapists or human resource analysts and likely think twice about taking another run.

'Twas ever thus but that makes it no less a shame.

Mary Agnes Welch is a former journalist who now works for Probe Research.