When the Manitoba PCs lost their leader, the NDP lost its greatest asset

Obby Khan speaks to reporters at the Manitoba Legislature on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, where he announced he was stepping down as leader of the Opposition Progressive Conservatives. (Bartley Kives/CBC)Social SharingFor the third time in just over five years, Manitoba's Progressive Conservatives are looking for a new leader.

The whirlwind, weekend dissolution of Obby Khan's dominion over the Manitoba PCs has left the party in a place it knows all too well: Searching for someone who can revive its standing in the eyes of voters who don't trust it, if they even think about it at all.

Ten years ago, the PCs were immensely popular. Under Brian Pallister, the Tories soared to unprecedented heights, winning 40 out of 57 seats in the 2016 general election.

Five years later, the six-foot-eight former insurance agent fell down to earth as the victim of both pandemic-era public mistrust and his own ill-considered comments about colonization.

Pallister resigned as Manitoba's premier and PC leader in September 2021 after only five years as premier.

His full-time successor only lasted two.

Heather Stefanson was selected PC leader and premier in 2021 under a cloud of controversy, failed to connect with voters and then demoralized her own party by going along with a ghoulish 2023 election campaign pledge to refuse to search for the remains of murdered Indigenous women.

The NDP's decisive defeat of Stefanson's PCs paved the way for Khan to assume the reins of the party in 2025 after winning his own squeaker of a leadership race.

In retrospect, Khan was doomed from the start.

The former football player and fruit-juice purveyor had only been elected to public office three years earlier.

While experience is no guarantee of success — Stefanson crashed and burned as leader despite spending decades at the Manitoba Legislature — the task of rebuilding a party from the ground up was too tall even for a mountain of an offensive lineman.

From the start, Khan made no effort to distance himself from Stefanson.

During the 2025 PC leadership campaign, he refused to describe the Stefanson government's refusal to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of murder victims as a mistake.

He also said during the race he was unaware the term "parental rights" — another 2023 campaign plank and one he fronted on billboards — could be seen as a transphobic dog whistle.

Centrist voters who consider themselves fiscal but not social conservatives may have sniffed out a whiff of intolerance, despite Khan's undeniable lived experience as a Muslim person of colour in a predominantly Christian, white society.

Inexperience, excessive loyalty and dogmatism, however, do not explain Khan's inability to make Manitoba's Tories more appealing at a time when the governing New Democrats have thus far failed to do the one thing they campaigned on the most in 2023, which is "fixing health care."

Head to head against Wab Kinew, a social media personality as well as a premier, Khan was just as uncompetitive on TikTok as he was talking policy.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau's staggering unpopularity was an asset for Pierre Poilievre, who was poised to take over the job before Trudeau's resignation. (The Canadian Press)Khan was to Kinew what Justin Trudeau was to Pierre Poilievre: The gift that kept on giving, as long as he remained in his position.

Poilievre learned the hard way what can happen when you vanquish your enemy far too thoroughly. While there is no Mark Carney waiting in the wings of the Manitoba PCs, aided on by an external threat on the scale of a Donald Trump, the Tories do have a chance to begin to turn their fortunes around.

To be clear, the Tories likely can not recover in time for the 2027 election. Kinew remains too popular. Winning power back in the next election after the coming race is a more reasonable goal.

Still, if the PCs select a woman as their next leader, Kinew will not be able to be as pugilistic as he was with Khan.

This is not a sexist statement. There was almost no reaction in Manitoba when Kinew implored Khan to "call me dad" at a May 2025 committee meeting. It would be national news if a popular premier said something similarly paternalistic to a Kathleen Cook or a Lauren Stone.

The counter-argument is Kinew already went head to head against Stefanson and defeated her. Kinew barely had to bend an elbow to do that, however, given the former premier's inability to communicate what she wanted to do as premier before she tanked her party's chances with a noxiously negative election campaign.

The challenges facing the PCs remain considerable. To many Manitobans, the party brand is as unpalatable as American cheese on Texas toast.

They have less star power than a tea light and will only get less luminous when longtime MLAs like Kelvin Goertzen and Ron Schuler retire.

They're also way behind in fundraising and could have have faced financial ruin if it wasn't for the generosity of Wally Daudrich, the former leadership candidate who purchased the old PC headquarters on Kennedy Street before he quit the party altogether.

In other words, the NDP may count on many more months and even years of success. But Obby Khan's exit from the PCs constitutes the loss of Wab Kinew's greatest asset.

This is why you have heard no triumphalist rhetoric from a highly disciplined NDP this week.

A generation ago, the Manitoba PCs needed leaders Stu Murray and Hugh McFadyen to fail before Pallister brought the party back to power after 17 years.

The federal Liberals needed Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff to trip up before Trudeau pulled off the same trick after nine years.

The question for the current Manitoba PCs is how long they will wander in the wilderness — and how many leaders it will take to get them past Mount Nebo and into the promised land.

Bartley Kives joined CBC Manitoba in 2016. Prior to that, he spent three years at the Winnipeg Sun and then 18 at the Winnipeg Free Press, writing about politics, music, food and outdoor recreation. He's the author of three books — two of them Canadian bestsellers — and the winner of a Canadian Screen Award for reporting.