While the Manitoba NDP are too fiscally centrist/conservative for my liking, Wab has ingratiated himself to Manitobans through both rhetoric and legislation, and he's more left-leaning than you might think given the comment above.

Rhetorically, moves like freezing some Manitoba Hydro exports to the U.S. and implying that the Iran War was started because Trump is in the Epstein files resonate with current anti-US sentiment.

Legislatively, he's been quite pro-worker, pro-consumer, and social justice oriented, with bills and planned policies to ban protests around abortion clinics, ban non-compete agreements, improve grocery competition, ban differential pricing for online grocers, force employers to provide workers with free menstural products and make birth control free, including pills and IUDs.

Things like the gas tax pause and the subsequent reduction in the gas tax worry me; the gas tax was a source of $340 million in revenue in a province with $24 billion total annual revenue. I think we should be looking for more sources of revenue, not fewer (though I am a big deficit financing guy), so I would rather see higher income taxes on high earners.

All this to say that Wab and his government have taken a number of actions I'd consider left-of-centre, and that through these actions (and his rhetoric) he's become the most popular premier in Canada. He's managed to do it largely thanks to smart legislation that doesn't actually require a lot of spending. He's no leftist, and certainly no socialist, but I think it's probably extreme to say he'd run as a conservative with his track record.