Members of a fledgling Manitoba political party visited Thompson March 28-29 to hold a meet-and-greet and hopefully collect some of the signatures they need as they try to reach the threshold required to become an officially registered party.
The Keystone Party of Manitoba needs 2,500 verifiable signatures to register with Elections Manitoba and they visited Thompson expecting there to be a fair amount of interest in provincial politics with a byelection to pick the successor to late NDP MLA Danielle Adams set to take place within the next few months.
A political movement started in January 2021 by Manitobans who were unimpressed with either of the two political parties that have formed the provincial government over the past several decades — the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP — the Keystone Party envisions itself as one that does politics differently, with more power residing in members and the constituency associations than is the case with the other parties, which they believe concentrate too much power in their leaders and have MLAs that represent the views of the party more so than those of their constituents.
It also sees itself as one that would respect the jurisdictions of Canada’s three levels of government.
“Provincial governments are actually being blackmailed by the federal government,” says David Andres, chair of the Keystone Party’s steering committee and also the reeve of Ethelbert, south of Swan River. “The federal government is delving into places that are clear provincial responsibilities.”
Provincial government are also overstepping their boundaries.
“They blackmail the municipalities by saying, ‘Well, if you do this, we’re not going to fund that,’” he said.
Too much in politics is done in a top-down fashion, says interim leader Kevin Friesen, who is from Manitou.
“We wanted a grassroots party, which was not a leader at the top, calling all the shots,” he says.
Frisen also wants it to to be a cross-section of Canadian society.
“We hope we get a well-balanced membership from all over, from different groups,” Friesen says. “We think we need the genius in every Manitoban and to change what government looks like.”
“Government should be run by the people, not run from the town top down,” Andres says.
For Donnan McKenna, a retired RCMP officer who spent four years at the Thompson detachment in the late 1990s, much of politics now seems to be about demeaning your opponents, rather than working for policies that benefit the population as a whole.
“We’ll go away from finger-pointing and blaming all the problems on everybody else, and also give our communities the power and responsibility to take care of the issues that are here,” he says. “I’d say that the Keystone Party is the vehicle to get back to that, where we’re not demonizing opponents.”
McKenna, who ran for the People’s Party of Canada in the Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa riding in the last federal election, says elected officials need to remember that they are always responsible to the citizens they represents, not only when they want their votes.
“We see it all too often in legislature, people won’t even answer questions,” he said. “We need people to answer questions.”
For the Keystone Party, responsibility to constituents is more important than the responsibility to the party. Andres says its votes wouldn’t be whipped and any members elected as MLAs would be free to vote any way. Under the PCs and the NDP, he says, if a Thompson MLA thought one of the other party’s proposals sounded good, they would still have to vote along party lines.
“It may have been something that was good for Thompson and your member would have voted against it,” Andres said.
Once official party status is attained, the Keystone Party’s ambitious goal is to establish constituency associations all across Manitoba in preparation for the next provincial election, which the party expects will be called in autumn of next year.
“Our goal today is to have 57 candidates for the election in the fall of 2023,” said Friesen. “We realize that a year and a bit is a tall order to get 57 [constituency associations] up and running after we register.”
Friesen believes there’s a slim chance the party could get registered and organize a constituency association in Thompson in time to field a candidate in the upcoming byelection, the date of which has not yet been announced.
All three of the party organizers who came to Thompson believe that there are enough people disillusioned with politics as they are currently practised to make the Keystone Party a viable alternative.
“We all know that there has been some things going very, very bad in our entire country,” McKenna says. “And in our province, we’ve seen things go off the rails. What we need to do is we need to fix that.There’s something wrong with the way our politics are being done right now and I think this is the solution, especially provincially, to fix a lot of problems that we see.”
Not feeling represented is a theme that came up from people in Thompson, the interim leader says.
“We’ve really got this sentiment from a lot of people where that they feel forgotten very often in politics,” Friesen says.
“It’s funny, all of these different people, different walks of life, seeing that something is really, really wrong,” says McKenna. “And we go walk around Thompson and we are in the same conversations because people are saying that they’re seeing the same thing.”
Governments are trying to exert extraordinary control over people while also not respecting them, says Andres.
“Governments have become basically an overbearing Big Brother, where they have intruded a lot into our personal lives, into our family lives, and taking away our rights and freedoms which are guaranteed under the Charter of Rights in our constitution,” says Andres. “It’s just people being unhappy with the way we've been treated. We as the electorate, none of us like being treated with disrespect. And we do have intelligence. We have intelligence to make decisions for ourselves and for our families.”
