Fall of the last TORIES?
CONSERVATIVE PARTY FINDING IT HARD TO WIN
WHILE CERTAIN GOVERNMENTS ACROSS CANADA MAY NOT HAVE ‘CONSERVATIVE’ IN THEIR NAME, THEY STILL GOVERN USING CONSERVATIVE VALUES. — COLIN CRAIG VOTERS TALK ABOUT NEEDING A CHANGE AND THEN SWING THE PENDULUM DRASTICALLY.
By all indications, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Progressive Conservatives are doomed in next Monday’s election.
After 12 years, the government first swept into office by Danny Williams is polling so poorly that it could well be headed for the kind of gut-punching electoral wipeout for which Atlantic Canadian voters are famous.
“Almost everyone thinks the Liberals will form the government at the end of the month,” said Amanda Bittner, a political scientist at Memorial University in St. John’s. “The big question is how big of a majority they’ll have.”
Thus, for the first time since 1943, not a single government in Canada will be headed by a big-C Conservative.
It’s been a rough 14 months for blue governments: the Progressive Conservatives were kicked out in New Brunswick in September a year ago. Alberta’s PCs fell a little more than seven months later. And finally, October saw the defeat of Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives — helped along by a solid wall of Liberal MPs in Atlantic Canada.
"Paul Davis is certainly no Stephen Harper,” said Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Paul Davis in a somewhat awkward third-person reference this month.
Only four times since Confederation has Canada been completely free of Tories, with the longest single stretch beginning in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Just as in 1935-43, however, Canada will still have conservative governments — they just won’t say it explicitly.
Members of B.C.’s governing party call themselves “B.C. Liberals,” but since the 1980s they have been known as a bastion for centre-right sentiment.
The party’s 2013 campaign signs were blue, Premier Christy Clark promised “strong economy and a debt-free B.C.” and former leader Gordon Campbell was appointed by Harper for the prestigious post of high commissioner to the United Kingdom.
The same goes for Saskatchewan. Although the province’s Progressive Conservatives were wiped from the electoral map in the 1990s, the governing Saskatchewan Party is effectively their modern-day successor.
The province’s wildly popular premier, Brad Wall, even hosted Harper at the Saskatchewan Legislative Building for one of the former’s last acts as prime minister: a promise to appoint no new senators. (Wall is seen as a possible front-runner for federal Conservative leader, if he wants the job.)
And in the North, the long-reigning Yukon Party has taken a cue from the Wheat Province of offering centre-right policies from a party bearing the name of the jurisdiction. Premier Darrell Pasloski, notably, was a federal Conservative candidate in 2008.
“What people need to recognize is that while certain governments across Canada may not have ‘conservative’ in their name, they still govern using conservative values,” said Colin Craig, a spokesman for the Manning Centre, a Calgary-based conservative think tank.
“And that’s what’s important.”
The last time this happened, with the fall of P.E.I.’s Conservatives in 1935, it took eight years until a new “Progressive” Conservative party was put together to take power in Ontario. The revamped Tories emerged with a platform of moderate government intervention and peaceful coexistence with trade unions. Gone were the old Tory notions of protectionism and complete rejection of Keynesian economics.
Early signs of a modern shift are already evident at the federal level, with interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose giving her support for a missing women inquiry and expressing a wish that 24 Sussex Drive be transformed into “the greenest home in Canada.” In Ontario, Patrick Brown became Progressive Conservative leader in part by aggressively recruiting support from visible minorities.
One conservative source told the National Post that any future Conservative or Progressive Conservative option would need to become “smarter and more inclusive” before manoeuvring its way back into office.
As for Newfoundland and Labrador, it’s debatable whether Davis’s government is really all that conservative to start with. Its now-retired stalwart, Danny Williams, famously urged voters to support “Anything But Conservative" in the last three federal elections.
In this latest campaign, Davis has been warning that a vote for the Liberals would shrink the size of government.
“They laid off thousands of public servants,” he said of the last time the Liberals last governed Newfoundland and Labrador, in the pre-oil boom 1990s.
And, in a rare campaign move for a Tory government, Davis has been cozying up to unions to warn that Liberals are “sharpening the axe” for a whirlwind of spending cuts.
"I will reward you fairly and quickly when we regain fiscal capacity,” he said in an October speech to the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public Employees, the province’s largest union.
The Liberals, meanwhile, are promising tax cuts, specifically, a repeal of hikes to the harmonized sales tax.
Liberal Leader Dwight Ball is even using one of Harper’s favourite campaign phrases. As he said in early November, his tax cut will “put money back in the pockets” of residents of Newfoundland and Labrador.
It’s been a slow slide for the Progressive Conservatives. In 2013, an Angus Reid poll showed then-premier Kathy Dunderdale was the most unpopular in Canada.
Since her resignation, her replacement Davis has overseen a steady hemorrhaging of support. According to the latest election poll, commissioned by the province’s NTV News, the Liberals were poised to take 74 per cent of the vote, to the Progressive Conservatives’ 12 per cent.
Twice before, voters in Atlantic Canada have filled entire legislatures with a single party. As Liberal fortunes climb — helped in no small part by the popularity of Justin Trudeau in the region — East Coast election watchers say it’s possible a similar fate could befall the Progressive Conservatives.
“Newfoundland and Labrador seems to have a type of pendulum politics, at least anecdotally, where voters talk about needing a change and then swing the pendulum drastically in the opposite direction,” said Bittner.
It’s an equation the Progressive Conservatives have seen from the other side. In the 2007 election, the party claimed 44 of 48 seats.