Reports have surfaced about violations from the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives in regards to their upcoming leadership race.

The controversy appears to be with people loaning others money to purchase memberships on a no-interest basis with a 100-year repayment plan.

Official opposition leader Wab Kinew says this is a clear cut case of a party breaking the rules,

"The way it's been described is definitely not allowed under the law. It's pretty simple, in elections law here in Manitoba. You can't pay for the membership in a political party for somebody else. You have to pay for your own membership. What's being described these 100-year loans, no interest, that definitely goes against the law here in Manitoba, and so its not right that it happened in the first place, but the thing that we are pointing out is, well, if the PC's are going to keep money from that, then that seems like the wrong thing to do as well. So they seem to know it's wrong. They should give the money back."

The NDP says out of the total 24,000 memberships sold, this scheme has accounted for upwards of 4,000 of them.

Kinew gave CKDM a rundown of the situation,

"The thing that we are calling out and what the elections commissioner is now investigating, is that it seems like the PC Party has disqualified Ken Lee as a candidate in their leadership, but they still want to keep his money. So there was a bunch of membership that were being talked about that had been paid for potentially through an illegitimate scheme and what we were saying is that while the elections commissioner may investigate, the PC party should just pay that money back and disqualify those memberships if they were paid for through illegitimate means."

When asked about the next leader for the PC's, Kinew was straight to the point,

"Regardless of who the PC's choose as their next leader, they're still going to continue with the same cuts to health care and mistakes throughout the pandemic that we have seen in Manitoba. So we'll be working hard on the other side to just put together a solid plan to grow Manitoba's economy coming out of the pandemic and also to fix the damage that's been caused to our health care system."

Kinew says that the consequences from this alleged membership scandal will be with the voters.

The PC's will choose a new leader, who will automatically become the new premier of Manitoba, on October 30th.