New Democratic Party of Manitoba - The Provincial General Election of 1969

The Provincial General Election of 1969

The NDP won 28 out of 57 seats in the 1969 election, and formed a minority government after gaining the support of maverick Manitoba Liberal Party Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Laurent Desjardins. Although the party had been expected to increase its parliamentary presence, its sudden victory was a surprise to most political observers.

The question of leadership was important to the NDP's victory. After Dufferin Roblin resigned as Premier in 1967, the Progressive Conservatives chose Walter Weir as his replacement. Weir was far more conservative than Roblin, and alienated many urban and centre-left voters who had previously supported the party. The Liberals, for their part, chose Robert Bend as their leader shortly before the election. Like Weir, Bend was a rural populist who had difficulty appealing to urban voters. The Liberal Party's "rodeo-theme" campaign also seemed anachronistic to most voters in 1969.

Schreyer, by contrast, was a centrist within the NDP. He was not ideologically committed to democratic socialism, and was in many respects more similar to Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau than to the province's traditional NDP leadership. He was also the first of Manitoba's social-democratic leaders who was not from an Anglo-Saxon and Protestant background. A German-Austrian Catholic from rural Manitoba, he appealed to constituencies that were not previously inclined to support the NDP.