Tougher on crime, more nimble with health care? How the PCs are trying to win back suburban Winnipeg voters

Some time between this winter and next fall, Premier Heather Stefanson must convince tens of thousands of moderate Winnipeg voters that her Progressive Conservative Party deserves another term in office.

If she does not, it's likely the NDP will form Manitoba's next government and Wab Kinew will be the next premier.

Why do only tens of thousands of voters in a single city matter in a province with 1.4 million people and a land mass the size of Afghanistan? Historically, these are the voters who determine whether Manitoba turns orange or blue on election day.

When the PCs do well in Winnipeg, they tend to win power. When they do poorly, the NDP tends to win. 

While this is a gross oversimplification of the political dynamics at play across Manitoba, Stefanson and Kinew are effectively fighting for the hearts and minds of a relatively small number of adults whose voting habits are more promiscuous than partisan — in as few as nine or 10 seats on the suburban fringes of Winnipeg.

In short, the PCs must convince some of the middle-income, moderate Winnipeggers who appear to have abandoned the Tories since the pandemic started — according to a series of polls — that the party in power since 2016 deserves to stick around until 2027.

The NDP must convince those very same skittish people in those very same swing constituencies to continue their mistrust of the Progressive Conservatives — if not to the point where they actually vote New Democrat then at least to extent they sit out the next election cycle altogether.

The PCs made it clear this month how they intend to win those suburban Winnipeggers back, based on Stefanson's Tuesday throne speech and a few spending announcements made before the Kirkfield Park byelection blackout started.

For starters, the PCs are going big on homelessness and crime, betting that suburban Winnipeggers are so concerned about the state of the inner city, they will embrace a party known more for law and order than the socially minded NDP.

In early November, Stefanson appeared with Winnipeg's new mayor, Scott Gillingham, to announce the return of city police-RCMP co-operation on outstanding warrants and a renewed focus on violent offenders.

Downtown surveillance

Stefanson's throne speech also gave prominence to crime, raising the prospect of more electronic surveillance downtown.

"We are looking at what that will look like," Stefanson told reporters during a question-and-answer session on Tuesday, prior to the public release of her second throne speech as premier.

'Obviously [we're] not wanting to invade people's privacy and so on, but we need to ensure that we're catching the criminals who are out there … preying on vulnerable people in our downtown communities."

While this rhetoric will alienate progressive voters, they're not the premier's target audience. She is making the same bet Vancouver's new mayor, Ken Sim, made in October when he came to power on the strength of a tough-on-crime platform tempered with references to alleviating homelessness and addictions.

Stefanson appears to be making a slightly riskier bet when it comes to improving health care. The throne speech made it clear she intends to partner up with more private companies to deliver health-care services.

Manitoba, she said, needs to learn more from other provinces when it comes to private health-care delivery.

"We have lagged behind because there was an ideological approach that was taken for decades here in our province. We're getting beyond that and we are going to look to the private sector to help be part of the solution," Stefanson said.

The premier was clear to note she's still talking about a single-payer system, where the government — not the citizen — picks up the health-care tab.

NDP warns of 2-tier health care

But any talk of private delivery is like catnip to the NDP, which has been keen to portray the PCs as out to privatize anything and everything.

On Tuesday, Kinew claimed Stefanson is trying to institute a two-tier health-care system.

"It will create a situation in Manitoba where the care that you receive is determined not by your needs, but by your bank account," he said.

This may very well have been music to Stefanson's ears. While diehard NDP voters are likely to be skeptical of any form of private health-care delivery, swing voters in suburban Winnipeg ridings tend to be less ideological and more pragmatic.

It is fair to assume they care more about positive health-care outcomes — chiefly, shorter waits for surgeries or other procedures — than they do about whether the province is paying a unionized public servant or the employee of a private company to do the work in question.

For Stefanson, the risk inherent in this push for private delivery is not so much voter opposition, but the time it will take to make significant changes to the health-care system.

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, surgery wait times won't improve much before the next provincial election. Raising public expectations now has the potential to backfire by election day next spring or fall.

Disaffected swing voters are unlikely to return to the PCs on the basis of a health-care promise. Stefanson will have to deliver tangible results by next year in order to have a fighting chance in suburban Winnipeg constituencies, which not too long ago helped the NDP hold power for 17 consecutive years.