Legends of the fall byelection in Elmwood-Transcona

As next month's byelection in the federal Elmwood-Transcona riding nears, the only two parties who've ever won the northeast Winnipeg seat have plenty at stake.

The New Democrats are trying to hold on to a seat they've won in all but one election since its creation. The Conservatives are hoping to build on the momentum achieved by their surprise June byelection victory in the former Liberal stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul's.

An NDP-Conservative battle is the only safe assumption in a byelection where the Liberals, Greens, People's Party and upstart Canadian Future Party are also fielding candidates.

Other accepted truisms about the riding are not backed up by actual data. Let's look at three of them as the campaign intensifies:

Myth: Elmwood-Transcona is a bellwether riding

Elmwood-Transcona is the only federal seat in Manitoba where the two most competitive parties have been the New Democrats and Conservatives, with that dynamic so deeply entrenched it actually predates the creation of the Conservative Party of Canada.

You have go back to 1997, when the riding was known as Winnipeg-Transcona, to find a second-place finish by the Liberals. But even then, the combined support for two conservatives parties — Reform and the Progressive Conservatives — exceeded the Liberal vote in the riding.

But that does not make this a classic swing seat. In fact, the NDP has won all but one election in the history of both Winnipeg-Transcona and Elmwood-Transcona — held by Bill Blaikie until 2004 and Jim Malloway from 2004 to 2008. Blaikie's son, Daniel, won the seat three times, starting in 2015.

The lone exception to the NDP's hold on the seat was in 2011, when Lawrence Toet snatched it for Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who won their sole