SPRING VOTE COMING?
Government doles out more than $16M in funding announcements
Recent funding announcements seem to indicate so.
As speculation swirls about an impending provincial election call, more than $16 million has been announced so far this month in funding for grants and projects.
By contrast, during the month of February, about $750,000 was doled out by the province.
The amount of spending in recent weeks has provincial Progressive Conservative Party Leader Jamie Baillie preparing for an election call.
In a phone interview Wednesday, he said it’s “traditionally how these things work. All of a sudden, there’s money for everything.”
Baillie took the opportunity to call for fixed election dates so voters would be prepared.
Using the word “funding” as a search term, Metro checked the province’s media releases to get a rough sense of amounts given out during recent announcements.
The more than $16 million distributed during events throughout Nova Scotia this past month range from $12,500 for a smart grid technology study to $3.9 million for enhanced affordable housing and repair programs.
Grand Pre 2017 and Upper Clements Park both received $300,000 and the Black Cultural Centre in Cherry Brook got $230,000.
Other March announcements included $1 million to St. Francis Xavier University for seating improvements to its Oland Centre before Antigonish hosts the national Special Olympics in 2018.
The Lunenburg Yacht Club also benefitted from a $150,000 provincial investment and $2.25 million was provided for construction of a community centre in Digby County.
During the month of March 2016, the province had announced more than $29 million in funding. That included $23.3 million for the Yarmouth Ferry.
With the ferry taken out of the equation, funding announcements during March of 2016 amounted to about $6.2 million.
Premier Stephen McNeil wasn’t available for an interview or to answer questions before press time, but his spokesman David Jackson said the following in an email:
“When he was asked about it earlier in the week he said there’s been speculation about an election since the fall, and that he’ll be calling one at some point,” Jackson wrote.
Nova Scotia’s 40th general election must take place by October 2018, but is expected to happen much sooner.
Cape Breton University political science professor Tom Urbaniak said a spring provincial election is “a very real scenario” and a “tempting scenario” for the Liberals.
“If there is a spring election, it would likely be called within a couple of days of the budget being presented. The government will bill the budget as ‘good-news’ and will claim to show a balanced budget,” Urbaniak said in an email.
“Stephen McNeil’s calculation around a spring election would be that, since there is effectively a pre-election campaign now, waiting longer will give the opposition parties more opportunity to take high-profile positions, call into question some of the budget numbers and in the case of the NDP, to try to give more name recognition and profile to leader Gary Burrill.”
On the other hand, Urbaniak said waiting until the fall would allow the government to deliver regionspecific good news announcements. He said it would give them more time to implement some recommendations from the classroom improvement task force.
Urbaniak said the issue of electoral boundaries is a ‘wild card’ when speculating about the timing of an election call.
“The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal raised serious concerns about the lack of legitimacy of the 2012 electoral-boundaries process and the harm that was done in that process to minority and Acadian representation,” he said.