Notley the only NDP premier in Canada

Tuesday’s defeat of Greg Selinger in Manitoba’s provincial election has left Rachel Notley as the last NDP premier standing.

The election saw Manitoba’s NDP decimated by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives, leaving the PCs to take power for the first time in 16 years and form a colossal majority government with 40 of the province’s 57 seats.

By comparison, the NDP picked up just 14 seats — tumbling from the 35 it held before the election — and the Liberal party nabbed three.

Although she now stands alone among Canadian premiers, Notley said Wednesday she sees her position as the first in a new wave of NDP governments, rather than the last.

She’s “leading,” she said, “not following.”

The Manitoba race saw a sometimes nasty campaign, with personal digs thrown from both sides, but Notley doesn’t think there are any lessons to be learned from the NDP’s defeat there.

Extending her congratulations to Pallister and thanking Selinger for his service, Notley said the NDP “provided good governance and good leadership to the people of Manitoba for 16 years.”

“Then the people of Manitoba do what the people of Manitoba often do, which is change governments, and that’s mostly what happened,” she said.

Selinger came into the election on the back of a broken promise; he said during the 2011 election campaign there would be no new taxes, then went ahead and raised the provincial sales tax two years later. That caused a revolt in his party and forced a leadership contest he won by the skin of his teeth.

Notley agreed there’s a lesson to be taken from that.

“If you run on something that is that critical and that pivotal in the course of a campaign, you’ve got to keep your promise, you’ve just got to stick with it,” she said.

“So, that’s what we’re doing.”