Former councillor, PC cabinet minister Kevin Klein to make 2nd run for Winnipeg mayor

Former councillor, PC cabinet minister Kevin Klein to make 2nd run for Winnipeg mayor

Klein says he intends to register as 12th mayoral candidate with just under 2 months left in race

Former city councillor and provincial cabinet minister Kevin Klein says he's about to launch a second campaign to be Winnipeg's mayor.

Klein, who finished third in Winnipeg's 2022 mayoral race behind Scott Gillingham and second-place candidate Glen Murray, said he's running again because he believes the city is worse off than it was four years ago.

In an interview, Klein said he has spoken to Winnipeggers who don't believe Gillingham has fulfilled his 2022 election promises.

"They do not feel safer in the city of Winnipeg. They do not feel safer going downtown. They do not believe the mayor maintained a fair and reasonable tax structure," Klein said Monday on the patio of a restaurant in Charleswood.

Entering the six-month mayoral campaign period with less than two months to go before the Oct. 28 election day, Klein said he'll reveal his own fiscal and crime reduction plans in the coming weeks.

"I don't want to promise change for the sake of change. I want to make sure that we introduce change that makes sense and that is going to help Winnipeggers," he said.

Klein served as the city councillor for Winnipeg's Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood ward for a single term, from 2018 to 2022, when he entered a mayoral race left wide open by Brian Bowman's retirement from politics.

He later won the December 2022 provincial byelection in Winnipeg's Kirkfield Park constituency. He spent a year as a Progressive Conservative MLA, as well as the environment minister in former premier Heather Stefanson's cabinet, before his defeat in the 2023 provincial election.

Klein has since distanced himself from the PCs and calls himself "a political orphan." In December 2023, he was the first former member of Stefanson's cabinet to corroborate Premier Wab Kinew's claim the outgoing Tory government attempted to approve mining company Sio Silica's licence during what's referred to as the "caretaker period," before Kinew's NDP took office.

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Klein, whose mother was murdered by her second husband in 1991, said he actually lost faith in the PCs during the 2023 election campaign, when Stefanson promised not to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of two murdered First Nations women.

"Some days, I was incredibly depressed and wouldn't even knock on doors," he said.

Klein, who is now the president and CEO of the company that runs the Winnipeg Sun, says the newspaper will hire an independent journalist to cover the mayoral race once he registers his campaign.

He said he expects to do so on Tuesday, which is only 21 days before the mayoral ballot is set and 58 days before election day.

Caitlin MacGregor, a spokesperson for incumbent Gillingham, noted Klein announced on radio station CJOB two weeks ago he was not going to run for mayor.

"If he can't even decide whether he wants to run, it raises serious questions about his courage to make decisions in a job that demands total commitment," she said in a statement.

"We will save further comment until he actually registers."

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Klein would be the 12th candidate in a mayoral field where Gillingham, funeral home director Michael Vogiatzakis and security company owner Don Woodstock have been making campaign announcements.

Klein said he believes he can make up for lost time with a campaign team that includes Keith Poulson, who managed the federal Conservative campaign in Manitoba in 2021, and Fred Westphal, who ran now-PC Leader Obby Khan's successful campaign for the provincial Fort Whyte constituency in 2022.

"I have to work hard and speak to as many people as possible," Klein said.

Time is not his only obstacle. The field of right-of-centre candidates in Winnipeg is crowded.

Despite his current disdain for the PCs, Klein remains associated with conservative politics in a race where Vogiatzakis is campaigning from the right and Gillingham is a right-leaning centrist who once considered a run for PC leader.

Klein has also faced criticism in the past. When he was a PC cabinet minister, he retracted claims of Métis ancestry.

During the 2022 mayoral race, he endured attacks on social media for his brief professional association with convicted sex offender Peter Nygard. Klein worked for Nygard for four months in 2012 and another two weeks in December 2013.

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"I get that that man is a horrible human being, but thousands upon thousands of Winnipeggers worked for him," he said.

"I got offered a job that's one of those jobs that you look at and say, 'Wow, this could be the job of a lifetime,' not knowing what the man was like."

Along with Gillingham, Vogiatzakis and Woodstock, Mazher Alam, Johnny Calderón, Chris Clacio, Brad Gross, Umar Hayat, Joshua Pagdato, Noah Redden and Zachary Uminski are also registered to run for mayor.

Candidates must submit valid nomination papers by Sept. 22 in order to appear on the election ballot.

Bartley Kives joined CBC Manitoba in 2016. Prior to that, he spent three years at the Winnipeg Sun and then 18 at the Winnipeg Free Press, writing about politics, music, food and outdoor recreation. He's the author of three books — two of them Canadian bestsellers — and the winner of a Canadian Screen Award for reporting.