Stuart Murray,
leader of the Progressive Conservative Party

He looked like the Tories’ new Golden Boy when he was acclaimed as leader in 2000.

Stuart Murray, with the backing of major Progressive Conservative players, would put the party back on track after the humbling loss that left them with 24 seats and ended a decade in power.

He was a businessman with a solid record of community involvement, including organizing the successful 1999 World Junior Hockey Championships. He was a personable man with a certain cachet as the only leader who could claim “road manager for rock band” on his resume. (He toured with Blood, Sweat and Tears before moving over to the Canadian Opera Company.)

Murray had no ties to the vote-rigging debacle that tainted his party and helped remove his predecessor Gary Filmon from office. He was a clean start for the Tories.

And then it stalled. Murray, 48, had little or no profile in the province. Billboards went up, hoping to introduce Manitoba voters to their new Tory leader.

Veteran Tory MLA Harry Enns says in retrospect, not having a leadership race to replace Filmon was a mistake.

“We are, to some extent, paying a penalty for the way he became our leader,” Enns says. “With no fanfare, an anointment.”

Murray has tried to attack the NDP on a number of issues, including health care, which initially rang hollow because, well, the Tories had been in charge of those policies not that long before.

And last fall he made a major mis-step that left many – including those in his own party – shaking their heads.

Murray secretly hired Taras Sokolyk, the man behind the vote-rigging scandal, to work on election strategies.

The party’s been working to put that behind them, taking up the Kenaston underpass cause, lining the route with signs imploring delayed motorists to call the premier.

Murray has also been hammering on the NDP move to take money from Manitoba Hydro and on lowering the tax rate, trying to appeal to core Tory voters and bring them back into the fold.

Attacking the NDP on health care and advocating expanding private sector health care delivery will also be part of the Tory platform, even though Murray knows it’s unpopular with voters.

Probe Research’s Scott MacKay says the Progressive Conservatives should stay away from health care.

“Health care is a weak area for the Tories, we know this empirically from recent research,” MacKay says. “They just don’t seem to have the credibility the NDP has on this issue.”

The Tories have also been hurt by new campaign finance laws, making it harder to raise money to run on.

The party is sitting at 31 per cent in a pre-election Probe polls, 10 per cent above the Liberals and 13 per cent behind the NDP. They’re still popular in their traditional rural ridings – where, as the saying goes, they could run a yellow dog under the Tory banner and win – as well as suburban seats.

But Murray will need to gain support beyond those strongholds if he hopes to move past opposition status.

“We’re going to run a very hard, aggressive campaign,” Murray says. “We’re going to run like hell and see at the end how things work out.”