Voting day has arrived for the race to fill a seat left empty by Manitoba’s former premier, and all four of the province’s major political parties are in the running.
Polls for the byelection in Winnipeg’s Tuxedo riding are open Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to Elections Manitoba.
The seat in west-central Winnipeg has historically been a Tory stronghold, but the NDP came within 300 votes of taking it in the Oct. 3 provincial election.
Only two MLAs have been elected by voters of the affluent constituency since it formed 43 years ago, both of which were Tories who served as premier. Gary Filmon and Heather Stefanson won 13 general elections or byelections altogether in Tuxedo.
Stefanson, who held the Tuxedo riding in Winnipeg for the Tories since 2000, announced that she would step down as party leader after failing to garner a majority government in last year’s provincial election.
She stayed on in that role until January, and announced her resignation as the MLA for Tuxedo in April. The Tories will choose Stefanson’s permanent successor in 2025.
Four candidates are now vying for the seat in Tuxedo.
More than 20 per cent of eligible voters in the constituency have already cast their ballots.
Elections Manitoba says 3,424 people voted during the eight days of advance voting. That’s about 1,000 more advance voters than in the 2022 byelections in the Winnipeg ridings of Fort Whyte and Kirkfield Park.
Candidates
Family lawyer Lawrence Pinsky, the Tory candidate in the byelection, has campaigned with a focus on public safety and provincial finances in order to motivate conservative voters by drawing attention away from Kinew and toward his party’s traditional ideological positions.
Pinsky has also attempted to portray the NDP as providing shelter to “extremists” who seek to defund police or embrace lopsided ideological takes on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
NDP candidate Carla Compton, a hemodialysis nurse, previously ran in Tuxedo in the 2019 general election and finished third behind Stefanson and Liberal candidate Marc Brandson.
If elected, Compton has said she would bring her front line health-care experience to government, even as a backbencher.
Jamie Pfau, the Liberal candidate, is an advocate for foster parents and a PhD candidate in community health sciences who also runs a cabin rental business in Lac du Bonnet, Man.
She’s pitching her political independence as an asset to voters who might be tired of the PC-NDP dichotomy in Manitoba. She said she will be able to return phone calls more quickly and respond to them more easily than members of the two larger parties could.
The Green Party — which has no seats in the Manitoba Legislature — is running its leader, Janine Gibson, in Tuxedo.
While Gibson lives east of Winnipeg, she has suggested that Tuxedo voters are educated enough to understand the benefits of political diversity.
Nearly two thirds of Tuxedo adults have post-secondary degrees, according to a Manitoba Bureau of Statistics report on Elections Manitoba’s website.
The riding is bordered by the Assiniboine River to the north and Ridgewood Avenue and the CN Rivers rail line in the south. Its western boundary runs along William R. Clement Parkway and Laxdal Road, while its eastern boundary runs along Sir John Franklin Road.
It includes the neighbourhoods of Tuxedo and Elmhurst.