Rankin chastised
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia voters will decide if they want Iain Rankin in the driver’s seat as the province lurches forward from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Dalhousie University professor says the premier’s admission of a 20-year-old impaired driving conviction is not likely to sway that vote.
“We can think of cases where somebody has something in their personal life that isn’t great and does that affect them as a politician, and it depends on all sorts of things,” said Lori Turnbull, director of the school of public administration and an associate professor of political science at Dalhousie.
Turnbull said it depends on the person, when it happened, what the nature of it was and whether it really reflects on the person's role as an elected official.
"If this happened recently, that would be a completely different story in that if he is the premier and he is in trouble with the law, that’s not a thing you can manage as a premier," Turnbull said. "Since it happened 20 years ago, I think it’s a different scenario. He’s talking to us about what his life was like as a 19-year-old and what he did then as opposed to what he does now.”
Turnbull said any effect on Rankin on the campaign trail “is completely manageable and will not show up in the vote.”
Rankin, who ascended to the Liberal leadership in early February to succeed outgoing premier Stephen McNeil, kicked off the COVID briefing on July 5 by telling online listeners he had been convicted of driving while impaired in 2003, a conviction that he said was well known among family and friends but that was being disclosed to the public for the first time.
Rankin said the conviction that resulted in a fine and a one-year driving suspension happened when he was a young man, and “it’s behaviour that I’m not proud of.”
Two years after that, there was another charge, but Rankin said he was “found innocent.”
Rankin called it a mistake he made as a young man and said he’s moved on with his life.
“We learned about the premier’s two drinking and driving arrests — and his party’s choice to conceal those arrests from the public during his eight years in office — on Monday at a public health briefing,” Barbara Adams, the Progressive Conservative for Cole Harbour-Eastern Passage, said in a statement Tuesday.
“The premier describing himself as innocent, when it is now clear from media reports that he got off on a technicality, is as troubling as using a COVID-19 briefing to do political damage control for his selfish behaviour,” she added.
“I am sympathetic to anyone who tries to turn their life around after making a mistake as an adult, and I believe in second chances. But it’s clear the premier didn’t learn his lesson. After his licence was suspended for a first offence, he engaged in the same behaviour a second time. He then mischaracterized the outcome of his second offence yesterday to Nova Scotians, downplaying the severity and significance of his actions.”
Adams said when she was 18 her uncle was killed by an impaired driver and MADD has noted that about 1,500 people are killed in Canada each year in alcohol-related vehicle crashes.
For every arrest for impaired driving, the MADD website cites that the same driver has likely driven drunk on 80 other occasions, she said.
“So I have no reason to believe the premier when he says it only happened twice,” Adams said. “He was only caught twice.”
As a provincial election call looms, Gary Burrill, leader of the New Democratic Party, agrees the premier has been less than candid.
“It is not forthright of Iain Rankin to say he’s being direct with the people of Nova Scotia when in fact he only spoke to this issue because the media was asking questions,” Burrill said.
“There are other things Iain Rankin has not been forthright about. In particular, he has said he plans to cut $209 million from public services but will not say how those cuts will be made.”