How Theresa Oswald would win Manitoba NDP Leadership Race

Whether she likes it or not, Theresa Oswald is the face of the rebellion against Premier Greg Selinger. This will help and hurt her chances as she now officially tries to unseat the premier. Her toughest task as a challenger will be to capitalize on the way it helps her bid, and minimize the unsavoury aspects of the rebellion.

Oswald will need to brand herself either actively or passively as the crusader who stood up for what she believes in. During the "Gang of 5'" resignation speechNov. 3, there were many nasty accusations about Selinger's leadership style. Some people within New Democratic ranks accused them of breaching cabinet solidarity.

On the day she announced her candidacy for leader and again at her campaign launch party, Oswald painted the rebellion as a last resort. She said it came after "months and months ... and months" of failed backroom negotiations where the high ranking cabinet ministers pleaded with Selinger to look at the polling data and leave on his own accord. The only way Oswald will win is if she's successfully able to convince the NDP voting members that the rebellion only happened because they did what they thought was best for Manitobans.

To do it, she will try to show that the rebels weren't a fringe faction of the NDP caucus, but the brave ones who spoke up.

Support from Lemieux, Allan

Cabinet Minister Ron Lemieux and MLA Nancy Allan introduced Oswald at her campaign launch party. Support like this will be critical to her success. The more caucus support Oswald can muster even from fellow contender Steve Ashton for that matter the better positioned Oswald's team can frame the narrative.

As former Finance Minister Jennifer Howard quit Greg Selinger's team flanked by Oswald and the 3 other rebels, she said they did not do so in isolation. The more caucus members who stand up during the leadership campaign and say Greg Selinger isn't the best candidate to lead the NDP into the next election, the more successful Oswald will be.

In the 2009 leadership race then-training and trade minister Andrew Swan had a lot of backers. He bowed out of the race to throw his support behind the eventual winner, Greg Selinger. Fast-forward to present day and now Swan is singing a different tune. He's one of Selinger's cabinet ministers who joined Oswald and rebelled against him. For Oswald to win, she'll need Swan to pull those strings and get the backers he had in 2009 to support her now.

Two of those supporters then-president of the Manitoba Federation of Labour, Darlene Dziewit, and Swan's campaign manager Becky Barrett (a former Doer cabinet minister) look poised to support Oswald in this leadership bid. They were the two NDP executive members who joined the rebels and called on Selinger to quit.

Leadership races offer up a unique challenge in Canadian democracy. Candidates need to square off against people within their own party. They often start outpositive but inevitably transition into taking blows at other candidates. Oswald's blows against the premier started during the rebellion when she quit his cabinet and haven't stopped.

In her first campaign promise Dec. 30, Oswald called the premier's "fixation" on balancing the books by 2016/2017 as "dangerous."She's even been quick to turn on fellow challenger Steve Ashton. She painted Ashton as "reckless" for his PST referendum promise that could scrap the increase to the provincial tax all together and that it was a "capital-C Conservative policy."Ashton has been in politics for long enough to be criticized for a lot of things, but being too conservative surprised even him.

Before all of this started Oswald was seen by some as a more centrist candidate. She was one of the NDP MLAs from South Winnipeg who came to power during centrist leader Gary Doer's charm. Political Scientist Raymond Hebert says that centrist image Oswald carried may just have been a uniformed assumption, but it's an image she's shedding in the early days of this leadership campaign.

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When I asked her about it, Oswald said with her trademark smirk "maybe you've just had me wrong all along, Chris." Maybe. Oswald may pick up some of the further left factions of the party, but traditionally more centrist are the victors. Hebert says Oswaldmay want to present more centrist policy ideas if she wants to look poised to battle Brian Pallister and the Progressive Conservatives in the next general election.

And at the end of the day, that will need to be her main message: Oswald thinks she's the only candidate who can win against Pallister.It's what started this rebellion in the first place, and could be how it ends, too.