Western Standard - January 29, 2026


What the hell is wrong with the Manitoba PC Party？

Western Standard News Update ｜ $885 million on health for illegal immigrants, refugees ｜ 27 Jan 2026 On the Floor at the CPC 2026 Convention

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

167.28

Word count

2,943

Sentence count

215

People

Also mentioned:
Neaston Ant Wally Dautrich Pierre Oliver Doug Ford Canoo Brian Pallister Brian Mulroney Wally Dowrich Charlie Kirk Webb Canoe Elon Musk Churchill Trump Noah

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wally Dowrich is a businessman in Manitoba, he narrowly won the leadership of the Manitoba PC Party in 2025, and he is seeking the nomination in a by-election in the constituency of Turtle Mountain. We talk about Manitoba politics, what's happening in the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party, and what the future of Manitoba holds as it moves towards its next election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Good day, I'm Derek Phil DeBrant, publisher of the Western Standard.
00:00:27.940 Today I'm going to be talking with Wally Dowrich, he is a businessman in Manitoba, he narrowly
00:00:37.700 almost won the leadership of the Manitoba PC Party in 2025, and he is seeking the nomination
00:00:46.200 in a by-election in Manitoba, the constituency of Turtle Mountain.
00:00:50.900 We're going to be talking about Manitoba politics, what's happening in the Manitoba Progressive
00:00:56.760 Conservative Party, what the future of Manitoba holds as it eventually moves towards its
00:01:03.380 next election.
00:01:04.560 Thanks for joining Wally.
00:01:05.540 Yeah, thanks for having me here in short notice.
00:01:09.120 We've met before, but you came in today.
00:01:12.920 I'll give you a brief synopsis of what I'm doing.
00:01:16.820 We own a business on Hudson Bay, we do polar bear tours, we're watching tours, and I've
00:01:20.980 been a captain on Hudson Bay now for almost 40 years.
00:01:24.240 My claim to fame here in Alberta was being part of the proponent for the project known
00:01:30.780 as Neaston Ant, which a number of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and some Manitoba NLAs have been supporting
00:01:36.480 over the years.
00:01:37.460 Neaston Ant is essentially an egress for oil, gas, bulk commodities into the Hudson Bay.
00:01:44.160 It's the fastest, shortest, least expensive route to world markets.
00:01:51.100 And, you know, being a captain in Churchill, the egress of the Neaston Ant project would 0.80
00:01:59.820 actually be 175 miles south of Churchill.
00:02:02.840 And there's some good reasons for that.
00:02:04.580 You know, the topography of the area, the hydrology of the area in that part of Hudson
00:02:13.160 Bay would work perfectly for bringing in the big ships.
00:02:16.260 We're talking about the big tankers that are doing a million barrels in one load.
00:02:21.500 We're talking about LNG, of course.
00:02:24.180 And the advantages there, again, as a proponent, is we got hydroelectricity very close by.
00:02:30.180 And the latitude of the project is just in line with Fort Mack in Alberta.
00:02:36.120 So for various, we've done various battles, you know, the proponents of Neaston Ant.
00:02:41.860 We've had Alberta on board.
00:02:43.400 We've had Saskatchewan on board.
00:02:44.740 We even had Manitoba on board.
00:02:46.380 But, of course, when we go into election and we lost Alberta for a moment of time, I hate
00:02:51.080 to say, a lot of people lost a lot of hope during that four-year cycle.
00:02:55.660 You're talking about the NDP.
00:02:56.400 I'm talking about the socialists.
00:02:58.920 Yeah.
00:02:59.160 Yeah.
00:02:59.340 The far-left woke community that came into power here.
00:03:04.460 Thankfully, it was an anomaly.
00:03:05.860 I'm hoping under your premier, now that under her leadership, a strong leadership, that's
00:03:12.280 going to continue in the right direction.
00:03:14.120 So Saskatchewan, Manitoba, now, of course, Manitoba.
00:03:17.060 Unfortunately, we moved to the left again, which is part and parcel of politics in Manitoba.
00:03:25.000 But I'm hopeful we're running.
00:03:27.500 That's why I entered the political fray.
00:03:30.320 I'm at a place in my company where my family, my kids are all interested in taking over the
00:03:36.180 business.
00:03:36.880 Matter of fact, my son is going for his captain's papers right now in British Columbia.
00:03:40.960 We've got a number of ships that do tours on Hudson Bay.
00:03:44.340 So I'm at that place where I can walk away from the business and do something else.
00:03:50.120 And you know what?
00:03:50.900 I was talking with my son the other day.
00:03:52.480 He said, Dad, you know, you could move to Florida.
00:03:54.700 You could do a number of things.
00:03:55.820 And those are all fun.
00:03:56.980 But you know what?
00:03:57.440 I love my country.
00:03:58.540 And I love Manitoba.
00:03:59.460 I love my province.
00:04:01.560 I can't walk away.
00:04:02.760 So on the eastern end, we've followed us pretty closely at the standard.
00:04:07.680 Where's the Manitoba government stand right now for the project?
00:04:10.580 Well, I know, you know, it's to the left of where Brian Palliser was, but it's...
00:04:15.780 Let me tell you some behind the scenes things that have gone on.
00:04:20.100 Since I ran for the leadership and I actually got more votes, they called me Wally 53 because
00:04:25.380 we got more votes, but there was a weighted system so that the votes in the city counted
00:04:29.560 for a little bit more.
00:04:30.640 Nevertheless, okay, we've got a leader.
00:04:32.520 I'm lining up behind that leader, and that's what a principled conservative does.
00:04:37.560 And I'm also running in a by-election in the riding of Turtle Mountain, which encompasses
00:04:44.060 the southwest portion of the province of Manitoba.
00:04:47.320 But going back to when I lost that leadership race, I actually reached out to our now premier,
00:04:55.140 Webb Canoe, you know, through a couple of mutual friends.
00:04:58.420 And I said, if there's any way that I can help make this project of Niestanat or some
00:05:04.520 hybrid variety of it, anything I can do to make it happen, I'm there for you.
00:05:10.020 I think that I was acting as apolitical as you possibly can.
00:05:14.160 I'm known as a very right-wing kind of guy, libertarian, conservative, free enterprise,
00:05:20.520 against the woke stuff.
00:05:21.960 But, you know, sometimes in the interest of the taxpayers and the citizens of my province,
00:05:29.100 I reached out because it's a good project.
00:05:31.460 And so for two weeks, I remember now the premier talking about a possibility of a second port
00:05:37.440 in Churchill.
00:05:38.200 I think what happened is two or three far-left organizations came on the scene and said,
00:05:44.480 hey, you can't do that.
00:05:45.580 You're not supposed to be doing that.
00:05:47.060 It's not good for this or that.
00:05:48.200 But the reality is, is the project of Niestanat would be good for Manitoba.
00:05:54.080 It's a project that's sustainable.
00:05:59.420 It includes Manitoba hydroelectricity and part of the utility corridor that would be built
00:06:06.600 as a result of pipelines coming in from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and even southern Manitoba.
00:06:11.560 It actually would be an exchange of hydroelectricity going from Manitoba into Saskatchewan and Alberta.
00:06:17.020 Well, let's talk about the Manitoba PC Party.
00:06:21.500 I mean, you're running in a by-election in Turtle Mountain in the south,
00:06:26.200 but the Manitoba PC Party, it's never been known as a particularly conservative party,
00:06:33.160 but it seems to have moved pretty far off of even mainstream conservatism.
00:06:39.780 I mean, dare I say it's even left of Doug Ford at this point,
00:06:42.900 and Doug Ford is not very recognizably conservative at this time.
00:06:46.100 You know, I think it was a member of the board for the Manitoba PCs tweeted something vaguely supportive
00:06:56.780 of something like having something like ICE to remove illegal migrants from Manitoba.
00:07:00.960 Manitoba, and it was a pretty tame tweet. 1.00
00:07:03.600 It was not like, hey, I'm glad these idiots who try to run over cops got killed. 1.00
00:07:09.860 It wasn't even something like that. 1.00
00:07:10.760 It was just, Manitoba needs something like that.
00:07:13.060 And this guy was forced out.
00:07:15.540 They said he's not allowed to run as a candidate.
00:07:18.580 He was expressing an extremely mainstream conservative position,
00:07:23.040 like a very normie conservative view.
00:07:30.000 To answer the question before you said the question,
00:07:34.000 what I think is happening is you've got a party that is hypersensitive
00:07:39.140 to everything that the media says, and they filter everything too much.
00:07:44.920 And, you know, the gentleman that you spoke to, you know, I've used a friend of mine,
00:07:48.780 and I've told him, you know, just lay off social media.
00:07:50.860 Some people can't help themselves but put stuff on social media.
00:07:54.220 And, you know, the person who actually reported it was Nahanni Fontaine.
00:07:59.880 Now, she's a gal. 1.00
00:08:01.240 She's a member of, you know, MLA with the NDP party, a minister.
00:08:06.760 And she said something very derogatory along the lines of, 0.99
00:08:11.360 I wish Charlie Kirk, you know, I wish him dead.
00:08:13.960 So this was the person who survived politically saying horrific stuff. 0.75
00:08:19.360 And then the other gentleman says something that's really relatively benign.
00:08:25.560 And he gets axed.
00:08:27.520 And she keeps going.
00:08:28.940 As a matter of fact, she's the one who made the complaint.
00:08:31.940 The left is always going to do this.
00:08:34.060 Exactly.
00:08:34.520 Like, playing by their terms, they're always going to win.
00:08:40.740 So, like, and I get, all political parties are risk-averse,
00:08:44.720 particularly Canadian political parties, because we, you know,
00:08:48.440 they tend to be viewed as a monolith and leader-centric,
00:08:52.300 that MLAs and MPs have no individual brains of their own.
00:08:55.480 That's the way we're told to look at it.
00:08:58.260 They're all risk-averse.
00:08:59.340 But this was, this is pretty extreme stuff.
00:09:02.980 Like, what the hell is fundamentally wrong with the Manitoba PCs right now?
00:09:08.120 Well, you know, I don't want to speak specifically to my party,
00:09:11.940 because obviously I'm running with the party.
00:09:14.080 I don't want, I want that criticism coming back.
00:09:17.840 But I would say in general that the conservative movement in Canada,
00:09:21.360 in general, has been way too caring about what the CBC and what the mainstream media has been saying.
00:09:26.600 We've got a gentleman to the South, love him or hate him, you know, Mr. Trump,
00:09:30.020 he couldn't give a rip about what the media says.
00:09:33.020 And he says what he wants to say.
00:09:35.260 Sometimes he doesn't always, you know, he doesn't always win, have friends and influence people.
00:09:40.280 But he says, and we do need a little bit of that, I think,
00:09:43.520 where people just don't care about what the left-wing media is going to say.
00:09:46.960 If you looked at my record, as far as what happened during my leadership race,
00:09:52.080 you will see one episode after another after another of false accusations and innuendos and crazy stuff being said.
00:10:00.920 You know, case in point, I'm from Churchill, Manitoba.
00:10:05.220 You know, we actually check for polar bears before we open the door on the car at some times of the year,
00:10:09.720 because it can be dangerous.
00:10:11.720 But I made the remark, and it was live on Facebook.
00:10:14.920 It wasn't like I was saying anything controversial, and I made no apology for what I said,
00:10:20.400 but I said, in Churchill, you have no homeless.
00:10:23.260 And I gave credit to our mayor.
00:10:25.280 I said, I don't always get along with him, but I said the mayor works together with the RCMP,
00:10:30.060 and anybody who's on the street, guess what?
00:10:32.500 They get picked up and taken off the street.
00:10:34.180 Well, they'll get them if they don't.
00:10:35.620 Well, exactly.
00:10:36.280 And so that case in point, I just simply said, well, you know, we could provide a couple of our friends from Churchill,
00:10:44.880 I'm not going to say the word again, to in front of the legislature in Manitoba.
00:10:51.160 Okay, polar bears.
00:10:52.620 And, of course, it's a joke.
00:10:54.480 And, of course, it wasn't talking about homeless.
00:10:57.220 The premise was talking about how you handle the issue of homelessness.
00:11:01.100 And I think Elon Musk said it best when he said homelessness is another word for drug addiction.
00:11:07.220 It is now.
00:11:08.540 Yeah.
00:11:09.220 You know, there is mentally ill people, of course, as a result of drug addiction, but you have to take hard steps.
00:11:16.160 And my point on all of that was that politicians, they somehow think that they magically pat themselves on the back
00:11:24.640 because they're giving money to the poor homeless, as if those dregs of society, they're worth less than we are.
00:11:31.300 But we're the good guys.
00:11:33.420 We're going to help them by giving them money and a little bit of change, you know, so that we feel good about ourselves.
00:11:39.760 Right.
00:11:40.120 That's the liberal mindset.
00:11:42.200 That's the woke mindset.
00:11:43.560 So I don't care for that.
00:11:45.780 We used to have law and order in this country.
00:11:47.900 We used to have something called the police force, not the police service.
00:11:52.040 I like, I like, I hate to say it again, what they did down south, you know, the Department of War.
00:11:56.920 But we have to go back to the police being a force and not a service.
00:12:00.940 Yes, they are a service as well. 0.99
00:12:02.700 So you took a bunch of shit for the polar bear comment? 0.99
00:12:05.680 That was just the beginning of it. 1.00
00:12:08.200 I'll let your listeners Google my last name.
00:12:11.820 I won't vote for anyone who hasn't been accused of the whole laundry list of isms and forms.
00:12:17.820 If you haven't been accused, I can't vote for you.
00:12:22.160 Well, there was an online, there was a, some organization put a signature request to try and get me to step down from the leadership.
00:12:34.860 Oh.
00:12:35.280 Yeah.
00:12:35.460 Oh, yeah.
00:12:36.240 For Noah.
00:12:36.760 And again, that was all fake news.
00:12:38.360 It really was.
00:12:39.260 Yeah, yeah.
00:12:39.660 Yeah.
00:12:39.960 So you just ignore it.
00:12:40.900 And there's a few rabble rousers and people who like to make a lot of noise and you just ignore it and just keep going.
00:12:45.520 What do you think, I mean, it's pretty obvious, I think, some of the things Manitoba needs to do to turn things around.
00:12:54.540 It's, you know, it's kind of the poor brother of the four Western provinces.
00:12:59.640 There's some, there's some pretty obvious things that Manitoba can do.
00:13:03.440 I don't think there's any magic bullet to it, but there's some pretty obvious things to do.
00:13:06.600 But maybe zooming in, what do you think the Manitoba PCs need to do right now?
00:13:14.380 Because I, I don't know, I'm not a Manitoban.
00:13:17.040 Yeah.
00:13:17.340 I'm an Albertan.
00:13:18.160 But if I was a Manitoban, I'd have a hard time checking a ballot next to Manitoba.
00:13:24.260 Yeah, I think, it's my own personal opinion, and I think our leader would share that, and that is that we need to provide a vision, an alternative vision.
00:13:36.000 And I think, love it or hate it, that Canadians are tired of the, everything being politicized.
00:13:44.340 You know, and the conservatives are actually the cure to everything being politicized.
00:13:48.480 You know, everything, like, without getting into details, everything has a political life to it.
00:13:55.720 So, you just provide the vision of what Manitobans want, and that is lower taxes, and a better environment for starting business, and small business.
00:14:08.180 And, frankly, this goes back to the point I made when I was running for leadership, and that was drill, baby, drill, dig, baby, dig.
00:14:15.200 And every resource project that you could possibly get going, as soon as you get stuff like that going, you're going to, people are, the may series are going to say, well, it's going to take five or ten years before.
00:14:25.200 No, if you're, if you're fast, fast lining the approval process, and the fact that once approval is made for a mine, you're going to have the lawyers and the, you know, the, the, the people who are going to be starting that.
00:14:38.580 The, the money starts flowing right away. You may not see boots on the ground for the first year, but, but you might, six months in.
00:14:45.960 But we've got, we've got so many resources, Manitoba. We have just, unfortunately, bought into a left of center mentality that if you dig anything out of the ground, it's a bad thing, so we don't do it.
00:14:59.220 But yet people still want their EVs. They still want their lithium batteries. Well, we've got all that stuff. So why aren't we digging for it? And the fact is, is that our NDP government right now hasn't approved any mines.
00:15:10.680 There, there is a mine that came into production, but it was approved by the PC government that was there before Mr. Canoo, or First Minister Canoo was in place.
00:15:20.660 Yeah. All right. Uh, last thing before I let you go, uh, you're in town, Calgary here for the National Conservative Convention.
00:15:28.640 Yeah. Uh, I mean, uh, you know, I'll say it right. I'm, I'm here to support Pierre. I think Pierre's, uh, our leader. Uh, I would say that the left would love to, uh, tear him down and, and, uh, put us into a place where it looks,
00:15:44.180 he's last minute looking for another leader and blowing all our money on leadership debates and, and the money that takes to find a new leader.
00:15:52.000 We've got a good guy. And matter of fact, he got more votes, uh, than any conservative leader has done in, I forget how many decades.
00:16:01.280 Since, uh, it was the most, uh, since 88.
00:16:04.160 There you go. Most, since Brian Mulroney.
00:16:07.160 As, as a percentage in terms of absolute most ever. Yeah.
00:16:09.980 But as a conservative, you had the highest, uh, percentage since.
00:16:12.960 And if, and if it wasn't for the meltdown of the NDP party, we would be in power right now.
00:16:17.920 And we would be saying, you know, premier, uh, prime minister, Pierre Oliver.
00:16:23.040 Would you ever run federally?
00:16:24.660 You know, I've, I had a number of people asking me about that.
00:16:28.440 Uh, I'm focused on provincial politics right now on Turtle Mountain.
00:16:32.180 I love the writing.
00:16:33.720 Uh, I think the fact that I'm a businessman, uh, that has reached all across the province.
00:16:40.080 And then the fact that I ran in the leadership convention, uh, you know, that I have, uh, enough pole and enough, uh, gravitas to run in that writing.
00:16:49.760 We actually own a house right on the edge of the writing in Southern Manitoba.
00:16:53.140 Uh, so we've been going back and forth between Churchill and Southern Manitoba.
00:16:57.760 Uh, because, you know, when you run a big business, you, you have to be able to move around the province.
00:17:04.620 Well, thanks for your time and, uh, have fun while you're in town.
00:17:08.120 Yeah, we're going to do that.
00:17:08.980 Thanks.
00:17:09.440 All right.
00:17:09.700 Thank you.
00:17:10.520 All right.
00:17:11.080 Well, that's, uh, Wally Dautrich, uh, of Manitoba.
00:17:14.600 Thanks for joining us and, uh, make sure to stay tuned.
00:17:17.280 The National Conservative Convention kicks off tomorrow, Thursday.
00:17:20.740 We're going, uh, it's, it's in our hometown here.
00:17:23.180 So we've got, uh, a ton of reporters who'll be crawling all over the place, uh, annoying everyone at the convention.
00:17:29.660 So we'll stand by for lots of coverage.
00:17:31.640 Thank you very much for joining us today and God bless.
00:17:34.620 Thank you.