Nova Scotia byelections deliver net gain to Tories
By nature and necessity, political parties are eternally optimistic, so each of Nova Scotia’s major parties can find something positive in last week’s pair of provincial byelections. Some just have to look a little harder than others.
The Progressive Conservatives won Truro-Bible Hill-MillbrookSalmon River in a cakewalk, running their record to six wins in the seven byelections contested since the last provincial election in 2017.
The NDP held on to Cape Breton Centre, proving the party can still win outside its power base in the old cities of Halifax and Dartmouth.
The Liberals finished second in both, suggesting they are broadly competitive. But Grits may find more solace in the Narrative Research poll released on March 11. It gives them a double-digit lead over the Tories provincewide among the two-thirds of voters who can summon a preference.
Both seats had been held by New Democrats before resignations forced the byelections, so the party suffered a net loss of one — the Truro seat — to the Tories.
The PC win in Truro restores the natural political order to the Hubtown. Before the NDP took the seat in 2009 on its way to government, Truro-and-environs had been Tory for something like 41 of the previous 50 years.
The PCs tapped into that legacy and nominated Dave Ritcey, grandson of
Gerry Ritcey who, along with former premier Ike Smith, held the old dual-riding of Colchester in the 1960s and early ’70s. Ritcey’s win swells the official opposition PC caucus to 18 MLAs in the 51-member legislature. The Liberals retain their bare majority with 26 members, and the NDP has five. There are two independents.
The NDP’s distant third in Truro confirms what many locals would have told them. Former NDP MLA Lenore Zann may have won the seat on an orange wave the first time, but she retained it through the 2013 and 2017 provincial elections all on her own. Zann left both provincial politics and the NDP last summer to run, and win, Cumberland-Colchester for the federal Liberals.
The New Democrats professed high hopes in Truro and ran a strong candidate, Kathleen Kevany, a professor at Dalhousie University’s agricultural campus in Bible Hill. But the NDP only managed to win 14 per cent of the vote, compared to Zann’s 44 per cent in 2017.
The Liberal’s Allan Kennedy, also a strong candidate, got just over 24 per cent, but Ritcey ran away from the field with 51 per cent of votes cast.
The bright spot for the NDP came in Cape Breton Centre, where Cape Breton Regional Municipality councillor Kendra Coombes held the seat vacated when Tammy Martin resigned for health reasons earlier this year.
The Liberals were hoping for a repeat of the 2015 byelection in Cape Breton Centre, when their candidate, Dave Wilton won the seat. Wilton lost to Martin in the 2017 general election and was the Grits’ candidate again Tuesday, and again finished second.
Liberal popularity in CBRM has been a roller-coaster ride since the last election. It plummeted after the government announced hospital closures in North Sydney and New Waterford as part of the consolidation of health facilities in the region. Now, it seems to be recovering in the wake of provincial announcements of new health, education and recreational facilities for the area.
Old political heads will tell you not to read too much into byelections or try to discern provincewide trends from what are, for the most part, local elections.
While the Tories have won six of seven byelections, four of those were in seats previously held by Tories. The win that stands out is the Sackville Cobequid byelection last June, won by PC Steve Craig, a former Halifax councillor. The riding had been NDP back to the 1980s until Craig edged out New Democrat Lara Fawthrop by fewer than 200 votes.
But it was the utter collapse of the Liberal vote — they took just 10 per cent — in a suburban Halifax seat that caused a stir. Ten of the Liberals’ 26 seats are in suburban Halifax County, so if they’re in trouble in the sprawling HRM ’burbs, their government is in trouble.
But polls like the Narrative survey released last week indicate that the provincial Liberals have recovered from a low-water mark that pretty much coincided with the Sackville Cobequid byelection.
Only Premier Stephen McNeil knows when the next provincial election will be and, while the opposition parties are gearing up for a fall election, the premier says that isn’t going to happen.