The Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party leadership race is a two-candidate race between a twice-elected MP who promises to unite the party and a self-described outsider who promises to clean house.

PC leadership candidates Obby Khan and Wally Daudrich have kicked off their campaigns in a long leadership race that will culminate with an April 26 election.

On the first day of the week following the effective fixing of the vote, the two candidates made an effort to distinguish themselves.

“I’m the outsider. I’m the guy who comes to clean up the party,” said Daudrich, 61, who lives outside Morden, Manitoba, in the rural municipality of Stanley and owns three businesses in Churchill, in Manitoba.

“There are a lot of things that need to be cleaned up and I’m your man to do it.”

Daudrich is a longtime PC member who served on the party’s executive and also ran twice, in 2008 and 2011, as a federal Conservative candidate in what was then called the Churchill riding.

He said he wanted to shake up a party that he said had become too dependent on leadership imposed from above.

“I don’t want the PC party to be a place for elite leaders who know how to do things and who don’t look to rank-and-file members of the party for guidance,” Daudrich said in a statement. interview outside his home in Stanley.

“There is a Bible verse that says there is safety in a multitude of counselors and I think our members know which direction we should go.”

Daudrich, who runs a hotel, ecotourism business and greenhouse in Churchill, said Manitoba’s economy hasn’t grown as quickly as neighboring Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Manitoba generates revenue worthy of a province with a much smaller population and needs to mine more gold, zinc, graphite and rare earth minerals, he said.

“We need to start putting on our big boy pants and actually we can grow and I believe I’m the person to do it because I’ve done it with my own business,” he said.

“The Progressive Conservative Party has not shown such boldness in the past, not just in the recent past. We can’t trust socialists to grow the economy, because it’s a bit like a herd of cattle or a herd of cows milking cows: they’re going to milk the economy and we haven’t got it yet completely seen, but in a few more years you will see them drying up the milk supply. »

Khan, a former Winnipeg Blue Bombers offensive lineman who started several businesses before being elected to the Manitoba legislature in the 2022 Fort Whyte byelection, said the main task of the next PC leader is to regain the trust of Manitobans after the party’s crushing defeat in 2022. 2023 at the hands of the New Democratic Party.

“We need to rebuild our relationship with them, and we also need to work for accountability and transparency. This is something the party has suffered from and I don’t think it’s just this party. I think it’s everywhere a question of politics,” Khan said in an interview outside the Whyte Ridge Community Center.

Khan and Daudrich said the party’s 2023 campaign turned voters away from the party. However, only Daudrich criticized the party’s decision to campaign against the search of a landfill north of Winnipeg for the bodies of murdered Indigenous women.

Khan said Daudrich was using “really dangerous language” in the leadership race, noting his opponent told the Western Standard newspaper that he would “throw out the trash” in the Progressive Conservative Party and that a “clean-up internal” was justified within the party.

“I believe in our progressive-conservative values. I’m not going to destroy the team. I’m not going to destroy this party like my opponent wants to do. I believe we can be left, center and right, all together , let’s send messages for a better Manitoba,” Khan said, describing the party’s election as a choice.

“Do you want to go with the progressive conservative candidate like me who wants to build the party together from left, right and center? Or do you want to go with someone who wants to tear it down?”

PC members will be able to hear directly from Khan and Daudrich Wednesday evening at the Delta Hotelduring a question-and-answer session moderated by former Congressman James Teitsma.