Young Indigenous politicians are leading the Manitoba NDP

The mood was mainly sombre and the cash-bar business was mainly brisk as Manitoba New Democrats gathered April 19 in one of the mammoth RBC Convention Centre’s smaller rooms, to bid adieu to 17 years of NDP rule and Premier Greg Selinger, and watch the Progressive Conservatives’ crushing victories keep rolling in.

The young people clad in orange #ImWithWab shirts were in a more festive mood, cheering the video screen as broadcaster Wab Kinew was shown winning an inner-city Winnipeg seat. There was a similar buzz around fellow new MLA Nahanni Fontaine as she hugged her way through the crowd, clad all in white on her party’s grimmest night in decades.

There were two historic outcomes of the Manitoba election. Brian Pallister’s Tories captured 40 of 57 Manitoba seats, the party’s best result ever and the biggest provincial win in more than a century—a decisive mandate for lower-cost, leaner and business-friendly government. Meanwhile, amid the decimation of the NDP was something significant and also unprecedented. Four of the now-Opposition party’s 14 members are First Nations, a uniquely high proportion for an established party. With a race to replace Selinger coming, members have high hopes the NDP leadership could make further history.