Conservatives try to win east Winnipeg NDP stronghold by tying leader Singh to Liberals

The federal Conservatives are trying to use the New Democratic Party’s two-year association with the unpopular governing Liberals as a means of wresting a longtime Winnipeg stronghold away from the NDP in an upcoming byelection.

On Sept. 16, voters in Elmwood-Transcona will choose a new MP to replace Daniel Blaikie, who resigned from the House of Commons in March after spending eight and a half years as the NDP representative for the eastern Winnipeg riding.

The NDP has won 10 out of the 11 elections held in Elmwood-Transcona and its predecessor riding, Winnipeg-Transcona, since the formation of this electoral district in 1988.

The Conservatives won the riding once, in 2011. They’re now trying to reclaim Elmwood-Transcona in the absence of an NDP incumbent — and by attempting to associate NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the eyes of voters.

For weeks, the campaign for Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds has erected signs featuring Singh and Trudeau, calling the NDP leader “sellout Singh” due to his party’s confidence-and-supply arrangement with the federal Liberals.

The governance agreement, which was struck in 2022, committed the NDP to supporting the Liberal government on confidence votes in exchange for legislative commitments on NDP priorities, such as pharmacare and dental care.

Singh ended the arrangement Wednesday, stating Trudeau “will always cave to corporate greed” and there is “a bigger battle ahead” against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who he claimed will cut spending “to give more to big corporations and wealthy CEOs.”

Running against one party by tying them to another is unusual, and “kind of a particular strategy at this moment in time,” said Royce Koop, a political studies professor at the University of Manitoba.

“The Liberals are very unpopular. They’re certainly not competitive in that seat,” and so the Conservatives’ attempt to tie the NDP to them “makes some sense,” he said.

“But you don’t see that all the time.”

Confidence-and-supply ends during byelection

The day after Singh ended the confidence-and-supply agreement, Reynolds emailed a letter to Leila Dance, the NDP candidate in Elmwood-Transcona, asking whether she would vote to bring down the Liberal government in a confidence motion if she is elected on Sept. 16.

“I am promising the hardworking people of Elmwood-Transcona that if elected, I will vote non-confidence in the Trudeau-Singh government to trigger a carbon tax election,” Reynolds said in the letter, which the Conservative campaign shared.

“Ms. Dance, will you commit to doing the same? Yes or no?”

The Conservatives did not respond to a CBC News request to speak to Reynolds.

Dance said Reynolds’s question was fair, but she will not predetermine how she will vote without knowing the specific subject matter.

“I’m going to do things issue by issue, as they come up. I will look at them and make a determination on what’s the best interest for Canadians, but also for people of Elmwood-Transcona,” she said Thursday in an interview.

Dance also said she does not believe Singh’s decision to end the NDP’s arrangement with the Liberals had anything to do with Poilievre’s call last week for Singh to end the pact and vote against Trudeau in a confidence motion in order to trigger a general election.

“This wasn’t something that just happened over the last week. This is something that’s been happening for probably months,” Dance said.

Singh insisted Thursday he made the decision to end the agreement well before Poilievre issued his call to kill it.

“I can tell you that we’ve made this decision after lots of reflection,” Singh said in a Thursday interview with CBC’s Power & Politics.

Earlier in the day, he told reporters in Toronto that he would stay on as leader of the NDP even if his party loses the  Elmwood-Transcona byelection.

Singh then compared the federal Conservatives to Heather Stefanson’s provincial Progressive Conservatives, who lost last October’s provincial election in Manitoba. 

“Manitobans made that choice very recently. They rejected conservatives, they rejected the mean politics of conservatives, and frankly the cuts of conservatives in that province, and now that’s a choice they have again,” Singh said.

Advance polls open Friday in the Elmwood-Transcona byelection.

In addition to Dance and Reynolds, the other candidates are Sarah Couture (People’s Party of Canada), Nicolas Geddert (Green Party), Ian MacIntyre (Liberals) and Zbig Strycharz (Canadian Future Party).