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This article was published 2/5/2018 (875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Have the Manitoba Liberals once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?

That certainly seems to be the question on the minds of many supporters after learning that, just a few months before leader Dougald Lamont risks his political future as a candidate in the St. Boniface byelection, four top officials from the Manitoba Liberal Party had resigned. The resignations include party president Paul Brault, communications director Ian McCausland, fundraising director Scott Newman and Karen-Taraska Alcock, who was chair of the party’s election readiness committee. A fifth volunteer, Michelle Finley, also resigned.

PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont, at his nomination party earlier this month, is running for the St. Boniface seat in the Manitoba legislature. The province hasn’t set a date for the byelection.

No reason was given for the resignations, although several of those involved did issue statements that more or less featured the same narrative: taking time off from party duties to spend more time with family, wish the new leader the best of luck and we continue to support the Manitoba Liberals.

However, Liberal sources indicate that the exodus of executive members was sparked by a dispute over exactly who would be running Lamont’s by-election campaign.

Lamont, who has never been elected to anything before, is taking a huge risk by running in the St. Boniface by-election, made necessary when former NDP Premier Greg Selinger resigned his seat in April. Premier Brian Pallister has yet to announce a date for the byelection, but it cannot be any later than Aug. 28.

On the plus-side of the equation, Lamont is fluently bilingual and he is in many regards an upgrade on past Liberal leaders. He also ran once before for the Liberals in St. Boniface in a general election.

On the negative side, he does not live in the riding and — as witnessed by the resignations — he is the leader of a party that has made infighting an art form. In this instance, it was over the helm of the byelection campaign.

In an interview, Lamont said the party has already taken steps to fill the important roles. Party vice-president Harbans Sing Brar steps into Brault’s post, Lamont said, while other vacancies should be filled within a matter of days.

On the matter of the dispute that prompted those resignations, Lamont would only say that "there was a fundamental disagreement about the roles and responsibilities in the (byelection) campaign." In particular, there were concerns expressed about who would manage his campaign.

Lamont declined to go into further detail, other than to confirm longtime political ally Eric Stewart was going to serve as his campaign chair.

Stewart was the Liberal candidate in Wolseley in the 2011 provincial election. He worked closely with Lamont on Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellete’s successful 2015 federal election campaign and 2014 mayoral campaign. And Stewart managed Lamont’s recent leadership campaign.

Party sources said a group of executive members, including those who had resigned, did not want Stewart managing the byelection campaign. When Lamont insisted, the executive members in question decided it was better to switch than fight. Hence the resignations.

In a scenario such as this, it’s hard to know exactly who is more to blame or which side to believe: the leader who insisted he could not broker peace between warring factions in his own party or those who resigned in protest when they didn’t get their way. The only thing both sides have in common is this dispute — no matter what prompted it — has the potential to undermine the brand of both the party and its new leader at a watershed moment.

The byelection campaign represents both enormous risk and reward for the provincial Liberals. A win would give the party official standing in the Manitoba Legislature and trigger an increase in opposition resources and media profile, much of it at the expense of the rival NDP. A legitimate and viable Liberal party would also have the potential to change the current balance of power in seat-rich Winnipeg, where the ruling Progressive Conservatives and opposition NDP are running neck and neck.

A loss in the byelection, however, would spell doom for the party as it tries to ready itself for the 2020 general election.

The really depressing aspect for Liberals is that they’ve seen this kind of mess before. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Manitoba Liberals have had a long history of dysfunction, much of it caused by lingering grudges from leadership contests.

Leaders such as Paul Edwards (1993-96), Ginny Hasselfield (1996-98), Jon Gerrard (1998-2013) and, more recently, Rana Bokhari (2013-2016) were all dogged by infighting and discord, much of it at the hands of rival leadership candidates and their allies, who were simply unable to unite behind someone they didn’t support.

Weighed down by all that infighting, the Liberal party has repeatedly missed out on golden opportunities to establish itself as a legitimate threat to govern.

After defeating now-MP Kevin Lamoureux in a bitter leadership battle, Edwards charged headlong into the 1995 provincial election as leader of the most popular party in pre-vote polls. After running a seriously flawed campaign, he ended up third.

A similar situation faced Bokhari in the 2016 provincial election. Pre-election polls suggested voters were desperate for a viable third-party option. However, after sparring with dissident factions in her own party that could not unite behind her leadership, Bokhari found herself in the heat of electoral battle with neither the human nor financial resources necessary to compete.

There is a strong chance Lamont can make the furor over the resignations disappear. Recruiting solid people to take over the holes left by resignation would certainly help. But the only sure way of relegating this modest controversy to the dustbin of history is to win in St. Boniface.

Winners not only get to write their own history. They also get to pick their own campaign managers without being questioned.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca