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This article was published 7/10/2014 (2175 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

In some ways, Winnipeg's mayoral race is unfolding just as predictably as an episode of Law & Order.

Former NDP MP and MLA Judy Wasylycia-Leis, who had a massive lead 10 months ago, still has a massive lead. Tory-affiliated lawyers Brian Bowman and Gord Steeves, expected to divide the centre-right, are duking it out for second and third place.

You have to go to fourth in the polls to find a mayoral-race plot twist. That would be Robert-Falcon Ouellette, who's attracting almost 10 per cent of the decided vote in spite of being utterly new to Winnipeg politics when he registered to run five months ago.

"I prefer the term 'nobody', " the Calgary-born, ex-military University of Manitoba administrator said in an interview Tuesday at his Provencher Boulevard campaign headquarters.

Ouellette said he considers his status as an unknown commodity to be an advantage in an election year when voters are angry at politicians.

"Because I'm not connected really to any political party or ideology or any interest group -- since I don't really owe anyone anything -- I can talk freely about what I think needs to occur," he said.

Ouellette isn't truly free of party ties, as several Liberal-connected people, reputedly more by happenstance than design, wound up working on his campaign. He also has deep, historic ties to Winnipeg.

Ouellette's Cree great-great-grandfather lived here until the aftermath of the 1869-70 Red River Resistance forced his family to move to Batoche, Sask., where the second Louis Riel-led rebellion came to an end in 1885.

His ancestral family migrated west to the Battlefords and eventually south to Calgary, where he grew up in poverty, as he readily recounts before audience after audience at mayoral forums.

Given Winnipeg's early history, there's something more than a little symmetrical about a francophone man of Red River Valley Cree descent running to become Winnipeg's mayor.

As Ouellette is fond of mentioning at forums, this province was founded by a coalition of English settlers and francophone Métis. But three years later, the new City of Winnipeg elected as its first leader an English-speaking Protestant who fomented hatred and acts of violence against the indigenous francophones who helped bring Manitoba into Confederation.

During the next 140 years, Winnipeg never quite healed from these early efforts to sever ties between its indigenous population and newer arrivals from Europe. Ouellette is trying to portray his campaign as an effort to end this ethno-cultural divide, which has more of a socio-economic element today.

"My role, win or lose, is to further that long-term debate about how we live together in this city," he said on Tuesday, the same morning the Free Press and CTV published the results of a Probe Research poll suggesting three in four Winnipeggers accept the notion that an ethnically divided city is a serious problem for its residents.

Of course, Ouellette would have to be deluded to believe he is the second coming of Riel, a politician who could unite the entire population toward a common goal. But he does believe he'll capture more than 10 per cent of the vote on Oct. 22.

Actually winning is an unlikely prospect, as he isn't even aware whether his campaign has a means of identifying the friendly vote and getting it out on election day.

He believes more voters will gravitate toward him on the basis of his call for unity as well as his platform, which is something of a paradox in that includes both wildly optimistic ideas and severely cynical notions.

On the optimistic side, Ouellette wants to relocate rail lines, create more neighbourhoods where people of a variety of backgrounds live together and force the public service to follow a municipal mantra of "city planning, city planning and long-term city planning."

On the cynical side, he believes donations as small as $750 can make a city councillor beholden to the whims of developers -- and describes the construction of Investors Group Field in Fort Garry in almost neo-Marxist terms.

"It's a demonstration of the power of the south end of the city. It's a demonstration of where the money resides and who has the power in the city of Winnipeg," he said.

What Ouellette has proven to date is you don't need much money to get attention in a Winnipeg mayoral race. What the charismatic, well-spoken university administrator chooses to do with his newfound profile after the election ought to be even more interesting.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca