McNeil’s loving PC leadership battles
The knives are getting sharper, the barbs more pointed
If anyone is enjoying the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative (PC) leadership race more than Liberal Premier Stephen McNeil, it’s hard to imagine who that would be.
From the outset, the PC family feud has had a fratricidal feel, and as the first vital deadline nears – only party members on Sept. 11 are eligible to vote – the knives are getting sharper, the barbs more pointed.
Wounds inflicted, and divisions created during a leadership contest can nag a party when it eventually goes into battle in a general election, hence the premier’s muted amusement.
From the outset, Pictou East MLA Tim Houston has been on the receiving end of most of the autogenous fire. That’s because he’s the perceived front-runner, because his not-too-surreptitious campaign for the job began before it became vacant, and because some see him as a thin-skinned pit bull when they need a heavy-hided lead dog.
Careful never to mention his name, CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke and Cumberland North MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin have advanced a narrative that Houston’s the kind of politician people are tired of.
At all-candidates’ debates and in direct mail to party members, derisive reference is made of Houston’s policies as a proxy for direct criticism of the candidate.
His proposal to expand the number of legislative committees didn’t impress Clarke or SmithMcCrossin even a little. They’ve bludgeoned the idea and, by extension, Houston.
Houston has traded on his performance on the legislature’s public accounts committee to burnish his image, while his rivals refract that back to party members as an effigy puffed up with political hot air, spewing negative, unproductive criticism of the government in old-style practiced sound bites.
“The typical opposition politician will criticize the government. He’ll go for the sound bite. He might even trumpet his latest legislative committee appearance,” Smith-McCrossin wrote in an email to Tory electors this week, leaving no doubt about whom she spoke. And she wasn’t done: “As if hot air between politicians and bureaucrats in a downtown Halifax committee room ever fixed a single problem in health care!” Ouch.
Hot air between politicians is the very definition of question period in the Nova Scotia legislature, but so far neither Smith-McCrossin nor any other Conservative candidate has advocated abolishing that forum.
And, while legislative committees aren’t firing on many cylinders these days, a couple have traditions worth preserving and suggest potential for other productive committee work, if only politicians could swallow some partisan bile.
The law Clarke amendments committee provides citizens with an opportunity to wade in on proposed legislation, with some success in forcing amendments to laws before they pass.
For decades, the public accounts committee brought government failures to light when the full legislature was unable to get the job done. Students of recent Nova Scotian history will know that it was the public accounts committee testimony of former deputy minister Michael Zareski that marked the beginning of the end for John Buchanan’s government.
Party unity gets the usual lip service from all leadership camps when, in reality, party stalwarts are ensconced with their favoured contender and will worry about healing rifts when and if their candidate is in the leader’s chair.
Leadership contests are notoriously poisonous affairs, but when the venom drips too liberally over the general electorate, the party risks sending voters to the relative safety of an adversary.
Houston’s proposal to direct $100 million to treat chronic disease and relieve pressure on the health system that’s exacerbated when those conditions go untreated also drew fire this week.
A Smith-McCrossin supporter signed a letter claiming her candidate isn’t “just another politician talking about chronic disease management. Elizabeth understands and supports chronic disease management as a health care professional.” It’s always amusing to hear politicians accuse one another of being politicians. They seem not to realize or care that they’re making rhetorical withdrawals from the depleted account of public respect for their guild.
The preacher can burn down the mission and take what he needs but he can’t then bemoan the fact that no one’s coming to church.
Fewer than three in 10 eligible voters are all that’s required to return a majority government in this berg, and the quality of discourse from Conservative wantto-be-premiers is unlikely to improve on that dismal statistic.