5 Manitoba takeaways from the 2025 federal election

With the 2025 federal election in the rear-view mirror, the Liberals remain in power, the Conservatives remain in Opposition and the New Democrats have been reduced to seven seats.

Now that these results are clear, it's time to consider what happened in Manitoba on a more granular basis:

1. In retrospect, Marty Morantz didn't have a chance

On the eve of the election, Winnipeg West was one of two Manitoba ridings where an incumbent was in danger of losing.

This wasn't based on any hunch. Just arithmetic.

In the 2021 election, Conservative Marty Morantz beat Liberal Doug Eyolfson by 460 votes, which worked out to a one percentage point margin in a riding then called Charles-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley.

This mirrored the national support for their respective parties in that election. Nationwide in 2021, the Conservatives edged the Liberals, 33.7 per cent to 32.6 per cent.

The NDP, meanwhile, was the party of choice for 17.8 per cent of Canadians in the 2021 election.

The widespread belief going into the 2025 election was any significant swell in Liberal support would allow Eyolfson to overtake Morantz. The Conservative campaign in Winnipeg, led by experienced organizers Michael Kowalson and Tannis Drysdale, was aware it had to run a superior ground game in order to nullify a modest Liberal lead in popular support.

On election night, however, the NDP vote collapsed to 6.3 per cent nationally and only four per cent in Winnipeg West, according to Elections Canada.

That allowed Eyolfson to blow past Morantz by more than 7,000 votes and a nearly 14 percentage point margin. 

In effect, two out of every three NDP voters in 2021 jumped ship to the Liberals in Winnipeg West. Even Manitoba's greatest ground game couldn't stop that train.

2. Leila Dance didn't have a chance, either

The other Winnipeg incumbent to lose a seat on election night was the NDP's Leila Dance in Elmwood-Transcona. She was hoping to edge past Conservative Colin Reynolds for the second time in seven months.

In the September byelection, Dance earned 48 per cent of the vote in Elmwood-Transcona, while Reynolds received 44 per cent. Less than five per cent of the vote went to Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre.

Part of the poor Liberal showing in that byelection was the result of the extreme unpopularity of Justin Trudeau's Liberals. Strategic voting likely played a role as well, especially because byelection voters tend to be more engaged and motivated than voters in general elections.

In the 2025 rematch, the Liberal nationwide popularity was way up. Despite Dance's overt pleas to Liberal voters to choose her on a strategic basis, MacIntyre more than quadrupled his vote share to 22 per cent of the popular vote in Elmwood-Transcona.

This alone spelled doom for Dance.

In terms of raw votes, both Reynolds and Dance won over thousands more voters in the general election, thanks to a far greater voter turnout. But so did MacIntyre, who effectively played spoiler to Dance's attempt to pull off an anyone-but-the-Conservative manoeuvre twice in seven months.

3. Low-name-recognition Liberal helped save Leah Gazan 

If polling numbers alone dictated election results in every seat in Canada, Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan would have lost on Monday.

In 2015, Liberal Robert-Falcon Ouellette defeated NDP incumbent Pat Martin in Winnipeg Centre when nationwide Liberal support was 39 per cent and NDP support was 20 per cent.

In 2025, Liberal support across Canada dwarfed that of the NDP, 44 per cent to six per cent.

So how did Gazan survive on Monday? A strong ground game likely played a role, as did the professor-turned-MP's strong reputation among her core constituency of left-of-centre voters.

But name recognition also played a role. The Liberals nominated 23-year-old Liberal aide Rahul Walia as their candidate in Winnipeg Centre in December, when very few people in politics believed he would be anything but a sacrificial lamb.

That changed one month later, when Liberal fortunes began to rise. Walia soon found himself with a genuine opportunity to win.

In the end, the unknown Walia came within about four percentage points of knocking off one of the best-known MPs in Manitoba. A name candidate may have pulled off the upset.

4. Low voter turnout belied result in Churchill-Keewatinook Aski

There's a belief in politics that low voter turnouts benefit incumbents. The thinking is, if people are not highly motivated to vote, they won't show up in droves to get rid of an existing politician.

In Churchill-Keewatinook Aski, voter turnout in this election was only 37.5 per cent on Monday. Nonetheless, voters in Manitoba's largest, least accessible and northernmost riding tossed out 17-year NDP incumbent Niki Ashton in favour of Liberal Rebecca Chartrand. 

While that result made sense considering the divergent national support for the two parties in question, it remained curious due to the apparently low appetite to vote in this riding.

5. NDP collapse has implications for Kinew

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is on holidays this week and did not share many thoughts about Canada's election. He was unavailable to comment Thursday.

He won't be able to avoid the topic for long. The resignation of Jagmeet Singh as federal NDP leader has left a door open for a politician ambitious enough to take the reins of the federal party.

As a popular provincial premier, Kinew is an attractive leadership prospect for the NDP. The reverse is not the case: it's unclear why a sitting premier would be interested in reviving a federal party with flagging popularity.

As well, it is unlikely Kinew is considering going anywhere before his NDP government secures a second term.

Even then, Kinew may have greater ambitions. He could be interested one day in another party or another form of public service. After all, when his mentor Gary Doer resigned from his job as Manitoba's premier in 2009, he went to serve as Canada's ambassador to the United States, not seek another form of elected office.