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There has been speculation he might call a snap election but he said he will honour the 60-day blackout period on government advertising that would preclude a late June or early July vote.

“It’s not my intention to use government resources to promote my government during a blackout period,” he said.

Given the federal vote in October, that leaves September or November.

“Yes, it has to be one of those two,” Pallister agreed. But as he reminisced about going door to door in January during the 2006 federal election — “it was crazy” — it appears unlikely that he will want to campaign when the snow is starting to fly.

Manitoba is in relatively good economic health: growth in 2016 and 2017 outpaced the Canadian average and the unemployment rate, at 5.3 per cent, is below the national figure

It should be a comfortable election for the PCs: they hold 38 of the 57 seats in the legislature, compared with the NDP’s 12 and the Liberals’ four. The most recent Probe Research poll has the PCs down from the 53 per cent they won in 2016 but still 12 points ahead of the NDP. And, while the 64-year-old Pallister can point to a career that extends as far back as his days as a minister in Gary Filmon’s government in the 1990s, his NDP opponent, Wab Kinew, is a rookie who has by many accounts taken his party into unelectable territory on the margins of the political spectrum.

Manitoba is in relatively good economic health: growth in 2016 and 2017 outpaced the Canadian average and the unemployment rate, at 5.3 per cent, is below the national figure. Private-sector investment is up, powered by the value-added agricultural and aerospace sectors, while crop receipts, housing starts and retail sales were all strong last year.