CLC Blog

Manitoba’s provincial election took place October 3rd and the Manitoba NDP, led by Wab Kinew, won a majority government, taking 34 seats out of 57 (unofficial results), and deposed the Progressive Conservatives who had ruled since 2016. 

We are fearful of what harm this far-left socialist government might do on issues relating to life, family, faith and freedom.  

As a student of history, I understand that all socialist and Marxist governments end up enacting policies that are hostile to Christianity, to the moral underpinnings of Judeo-Christian civilization, and restricting democratic freedoms. 

This worry is only exacerbated by the fact that the NDP’s election campaign website included a paraphrased quote from Karl Marx on its Statement of Principles page.

Above: screenshot from NDP Manitoba website

Marx, the father of atheistic communism, famously wrote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.  

It’s disturbing that a Canadian political party would draw inspiration from communism, a philosophy which produced the enslavement of half of Europe for 70 years under the Soviet dictatorship, the murder and genocide of between 70 to 120 million people in the last century alone, and brutal repression still today in countries like China and Nicaragua. But I digress. Let me return to the implications of NDP rule for Manitoba and Canada. 

Are ‘No Free Speech Buffer Zones’ coming soon? 

Although Wab Kinew did not run on it during this election, it is quite possible that we’ll see government legislation introduced at some point in the next four years which would outlaw pro-life expression on taxpayer-owned public property. 

This is a realistic concern because an NDP MLA named Nahanni Fontaine has already proposed a private members bill in 2018 which sought to establish “Bubble Zones” around abortion facilities and hospitals, where peaceful pro-life expression would be banned within a radius of up to 150 metres. Every “act of disapproval concerning issues related to abortion services” would be prohibited. Thanks to opposition from the governing PCs, that bill failed. 

However, Fontaine did not give up.

She returned in 2021 with an even more censorious version, Bill 207, the Abortion Protest Buffer Zone Act. It once again sought to criminalize pro-life signs, literature and even silent prayer within a radius of up to 150 metres of abortion facilities, hospitals and abortion-pill dispensing pharmacies. However, it also added 50-metre censorship zones around every school in the province, with a goal of preventing pro-life information from reaching students. 

Now that the NDP have a majority, they can pass a Bubble Zone law without requiring a single vote from the PC caucus. That’s frightening. For this reason, CLC has launched a new petition, here, calling on Premier-Elect, Wab Kinew, to reject Fontaine’s vision of totalitarian censorship.

Could conscience rights Bill 34 get repealed? 

Following the 2016 legalization of euthanasia by the Trudeau Liberals, Manitoba’s PC government, led at the time by Premier Brian Pallister, introduced and passed a provincial law, Bill 34, to protect doctors and other healthcare workers from being forced to participate in, or refer patients for euthanasia.  

Bill 34 has become the gold standard in conscience rights legislation in Canada, and Manitoba is the only province which currently has such protections for its healthcare workers.   

The NDP officially supports euthanasia, so would this new government consider repealing conscience rights?  

Kinew stated in the past that he agreed with not forcing medical professionals to violate their consciences by having to partake directly in an act of euthanasia. However, he also stated that doctors with a conscientious objection should nonetheless be forced to refer patients to another physician who is willing to euthanize the person.  

With enough pressure from Canada’s powerful euthanasia lobby, might Premier-elect Kinew move to either repeal Bill 34 in its entirety, or to repeal the provision protecting healthcare workers from being forced to give their patients “an effective referral”?  

We must not let this happen. 

If you live in Manitoba, please ask your MLA, especially if they’re a member of the NDP, to strongly oppose any future effort to weaken the existing conscience rights legislation. 

Parental Rights Bill has been lost 

During the 2023 election campaign, outgoing PC Premier Heather Stefanson pledged that if her PC government were to win re-election, she would bring forward legislation to require public schools to: 

1. Inform parents if a child wants to use transgender "pronouns" or opposite-sex names. 

2. Inform parents whenever a third-party individual or group (for example, the degenerate Planned Parenthood organization) is scheduled to give any talk at their child's school. 

These policies would have been a big step in the right direction to restore parental rights in education, and to protect children from being groomed by sex-activists who have been given access to Manitoba’s schools for decades. Manitoba would have been the third province to enact such legislation, after New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. 

Since the NDP officially supports the LGBT agenda and the theory of Gender Identity, the defeat of the PCs represents a definite loss for parental rights. Unless most other provinces follow the lead of New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, I cannot envision a scenario where Wab Kinew would even entertain it. 

Pro-life MLAs reduced in the legislature 

Prior to October 3rd, there were 13 elected MLAs in the PC caucus who had been green lit by CLC, out of 35 total.  

Sadly, with the NDP wave that just took place, that number has been reduced to eight, based on unofficial election results. 

New party led by pro-lifer makes impressive show 

In the riding of Turtle Mountain, the yellow-lit PC incumbent, Doyle Piwniuk was re-elected. However, there was an encouraging byline to this story.  

Pro-lifer Kevin Friesen of the newly created Keystone Party of Manitoba came in third place, not far behind the second place NDP candidate, and ahead of the Liberal Party candidate. Friesen got 17% of the vote.

The Keystone Party platform included a parental choice education policy which would move school funding to a voucher type of system in which tax dollars follow the student to whatever type of school setting the family chooses – private, public or homeschool – instead of going automatically to the floundering public school system.  

As is becoming increasingly apparent, government-run schools have morphed into ideological indoctrination centres. A voucher-type of system that includes private schooling and homeschooling, would largely resolve that problem by creating competition and forcing schools to focus on academic excellence…. or else lose students to their competitors. 

We hope to see the Keystone Party – and Kevin Friesen as its leader – become a bigger factor in the next election, and in offering more socially conservative policies. 

Please pray for Premier-elect Wab Kinew, that the Holy Spirit might guide him to govern in righteousness rather than darkness.