How Trudeau could meet his doom
NOVA SCOTIA IS AT A PIVOTAL MOMENT. — PREMIER RANKIN IN CAMPAIGN DEBATE
When Nova Scotia’s Liberal premier chose to call an election in the midst of the pandemic, word on the street was that federal forces might want to keep their eye on this baby, just in case something unexpected arose. It could, observers suggested, prove a harbinger of things to come.
“A weak performance by the Nova Scotia Liberals would be somewhat concerning to the federal Liberals,” a political science prof at Cape Breton University told The Canadian Press. “There seemed to be a high level of support going into the election for the incumbent. If that level of support is eroded, that would signal to the federal Liberals that the public is volatile.”
Turns out the prof said a mouthful. On election night Tuesday, Premier Iain Rankin saw his government unceremoniously turfed from power, to be replaced by the Progressive Conservatives under leader Tim Houston. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will now insist there is absolutely no reason he should feel even the remotest bit nervous about the provincial results — “What me worry?” — even while he campaigns on essentially the same message Rankin took to the good folks of Nova Scotia before they chose to get rid of him.
Trudeau’s disclaimers may be hard to credit. The situations are not dissimilar, and there is much here for Trudeau and his strategists to ponder. The Tories started the Nova Scotia campaign so far back in the polls they were deemed to have little, if any chance. The Liberals had won two successive majorities and saw no cause to suspect they wouldn’t easily win again. Liberal worthies felt they’d handled the COVID-19 pandemic with considerable skill and believed voters would feel the same way. They expected to be rewarded with another mandate and saw little reason to believe otherwise.
Seems they were wrong. In the end the Tories increased their seat total to 31 from 17, enough for a majority. The Liberals fell to 17 seats, 10 fewer than they won in 2017. When the election was called the Liberals had a nine-point lead over the PCS in the polls, a figure they saw fall steadily during a month of campaigning. By the final days the contest was viewed to have considerably tightened, though Tuesday’s outcome still came as a surprise.
The next chapter in every unexpected election loss is “Who’s to blame?” and Rankin’s team can take some credit for letting their chance slip away. Rankin rose to the job after his predecessor Stephen Mcneil, stepped down in February. His message to the voters was essentially the same as Trudeau’s: “Hey, we’ve done a great job, right? How about four more years of the same stuff ?”
Even the verbiage is so like Trudeau’s they could have been written by the same spin doctor. Among the first words out of the prime minister’s mouth when he finally triggered the federal race was that Canadians face a “pivotal” moment.
“The decisions your government makes right now will define the future your kids and grandkids will grow up in,” he said outside Rideau Hall after gaining approval to dissolve Parliament.
“So in this pivotal, consequential moment, who wouldn’t want a say? Who wouldn’t want their chance to help decide where our country goes from here?”
Cut to Rankin, who told voters during a campaign debate that “COVID has shown us that we can take on big challenges when we do it together ... Nova Scotia is at a pivotal moment ... This election is about our recovery.”
Obviously, something about “pivoting” has captured the imagination of Liberal strategists. The dictionary says “pivot” means a change in direction, which is an odd choice of word for governments essentially pledging more of the same. In Nova Scotia it was Houston, who won his party’s leadership in 2018, who saw the opportunity for some real pivoting and moved to seize it. While Rankin defended the cautious course his party had followed over eight years, Houston picked up his party and moved it sharply to the left, promising wholesale changes to the province’s struggling healthcare system, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year alone to hire more family doctors, add more nursing home beds and shore up the mental health system.
It was a risky move in a province that already labours under a crushing debt load and has been adding to it in billion-dollar chunks over recent years, and probably not one federal leader Erin O’toole will be quick to emulate. But it left the Liberals looking like the ones preaching restraint to a restless population, and it resonated with voters who feel they’ve done plenty of restraining for now and are eager for something useful to come out of 16 months of lockdowns and curtailed lives.
O’toole, of course, was quick to herald Houston’s victory. If nothing else it undermines the Liberal belief that voters are so relieved to emerge from lockdown that they’re happy to re-elect whoever was in power when it started. It also suggests people are easier to attract with a straightforward idea on a single critical issue, rather than the usual weighty platform document few people read and fewer believe.
Health care is not just a Nova Scotia issue. It’s a Canadian issue and COVID has made its defects evident for all to see. COVID has demonstrated just how badly a similar repair job is needed across the land. Maybe there’s an opportunity there for federal Tories. A chance to pivot while the Liberals plod ahead on autopilot.