Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.

Politicians get used to tamping down figurative fires, and in the two years since his election as Manitoba premier, Wab Kinew has dealt with a few of those, from a brush with the ethics commissioner over accepting flights to the Grey Cup (he was cleared) to accusations of overreach in booting an MLA from the NDP caucus.

Then, this past summer, Kinew faced the literal kind, as more than 400 fires burned across 1.75 million hectares of land in Manitoba’s worst wildfire season in three decades, delivering a roughly $180-million hit to a provincial economy already struggling with one of the country’s lowest per capita GDPs.

Yet no matter the challenge, the premier’s popularity has remained high. Indeed, in this year of Trump tariff chaos, it can be argued that no

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