Stefanson grinds out a win in a Manitoba leadership race few expected to be close

From the second she disclosed her desire to lead Manitoba's Progressive Conservative Party, premier-designate Heather Stefanson did everything in her power to make her victory appear inevitable.

She launched her campaign in August, before the party cobbled together rules for its leadership contest. She declared her intention to run before other MLAs with leadership ambitions even had a chance to canvass their party colleagues for support.

She appeared at her campaign launch on Aug. 18 with a majority of the existing Progressive Conservative Party caucus lined up at her side. She had allies on the party's executive council that set contest timelines so short that they effectively prevented Conservative MPs from lining up against her.

The message, to anyone else who toyed with the idea of running for PC leader, was clear: run against me and you will be crushed like a cankerworm beneath the wheels of a Chevy Suburban.

But that pulverizing never happened. Ten weeks after Stefanson held her show-of-force campaign launch, the party's electorate handed her a razor-thin victory that may yet be contested further by her rival, Shelly Glover.

Stefanson defeated Glover by a margin of 363 votes. She captured 8,405 ballots, compared to 8,042 for Glover.

That works out to a 51-per-cent majority in a race where Stefanson was expected to win by a decisive margin, mainly by virtue of her support from the party establishment.

Stefanson made few campaign promises, aside from pledges to improve the relationship between the government and Indigenous people, increase health-care capacity and be a better listener than former premier Brian Pallister, who was widely regarded as insular and standoffish.

Glover, a relative outsider, made similar promises, but also made some overtures to a right-wing flank of the party that opposes pandemic restrictions.

"The gap was very close," Stefanson said Saturday night in a ballroom at Winnipeg's Victoria Inn, where the party held a scaled-down leadership convention. "We never, ever for one day took this campaign for granted."

And the campaign is not over yet.

Glover declined to concede defeat on Saturday, citing the inability of some party members to obtain a ballot.

On Thursday, the former Conservative MP called for the vote to be put off until every member had a chance to vote. She also would not say if she would accept the results at the convention.

So it wasn't much of a surprise when Glover followed through on that equivocation with an equally vague refusal Saturday to either concede defeat or challenge the results of the leadership selection process.