Who saw it coming? The Tories did
After an election like that, the two obvious choices are to pick over the corpse or look ahead to our solutions-oriented future. The third option is to try a bit of both, so here goes.
First some context.
A couple of things we heard, incessantly, Tuesday night — and likely will for a few days yet — were that no one saw this coming, and that it was a history-making win for premier-designate Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives.
The former is false but the second is valid, and not just because every election is historic in its own right.
The Tories made history with a first and a burst.
Nova Scotia’s PCs are the first Canadian political party in the pandemic epoch (I hope that doesn’t catch on) to knock off an incumbent government. Four other provinces held elections since COVID arrived, and in each the governing party was rewarded with a strengthened mandate.
Nova Scotia’s Tories ended that streak and added an exclamation point.
The burst came from the energy and effort required to close a gap that had them trailing the governing Liberals by as much as 25 per cent just three months ago.
They created the momentum they needed to win and carried it through the campaign.
That was a remarkable political achievement by any measure.
NO SURPRISE TO SOME
And at least a few well-placed Tories saw it coming, and very clearly.
David MacGregor is a Tory insider who likes to keep a low profile but — maybe because we worked together two decades back in then-premier John Hamm’s office — he opened up to me over the past weekend with his wellinformed perspective on what was about to happen.
MacGregor not only called the election, he put 28 seats in the Tories’ sure-win column and said he expected they’d take something just north of 30 seats. He rhymed off a lengthy list of Liberal-held seats the Tories would win, and he was right on every one.
Not for nothing, but MacGregor also gave me a delegate vote count before Tim Houston won the PC leadership in 2018. He was within 100 votes of the final tally, which ain’t bad when 4,500 votes were cast. I really have to start listening to him more.
Maybe the Liberals didn’t see it coming but David MacGregor wasn’t the only Tory who did.
As we all now know, the Tories were all about health care in this election.
LIBERALS’ BLURRY MESSAGE
NDP Leader Gary Burrill captured a little lightning in a bottle with the promise of permanent rent controls.
What exactly was the Liberal campaign about? The question isn’t entirely rhetorical. I’d really like to know, after 30 days of constant immersion in the campaign, what the Liberals were running on.
Their loss can be attributed to many factors, but a blurry message and their inability, or unwillingness, to defend their record on health care are at the top.
Liberal Leader, and soon-tobe-former premier, Iain Rankin did not have history on his side but, in the final analysis, Nova Scotians were unconcerned about history and very concerned about health care.
Just for the record, Nova Scotia’s Liberals haven’t won three elections in a row since Angus L. (Macdonald for those who need it) and he died in office 67 years ago.
It’s a glance into the self-evident to say the Tories ran a winning campaign, but it was a winning campaign right out of the gate.
They hit on the winning strategy, even before the campaign began, by honing in on the issues Nova Scotians worry about and care about the most, and that’s the state of the health system in all its parts.
FULL PLATE OF PROMISES
So now the Tories — tradition suggests they’ll officially become the government in about two weeks — arrive in office with a full plate of election promises to get to work on and fixing what ails our health system tops the list.
Houston is smart and realistic to warn us repeatedly that the healthcare fix won’t happen overnight. It’s a full-term project, and even then problems will persist.
But neither is Houston the kind of guy who lets the grass grow under his feet. He likes to make things happen and it’ll be up to the provincial bureaucracy to keep up.
Governments aren’t elected in Nova Scotia. They are defeated. That old axiom was only half true this time.
Through the worst — so far — of the pandemic, Nova Scotians rallied behind their Liberal government and support for the Liberals soared right along with it.
But the summer lull in the pandemic — or perhaps the beginning of its end — gave Nova Scotians the chance to look past the COVID crisis.
They — we — were reminded every day of the ongoing crisis in health care, through hard hitting ads from both the Tories and NDP and by some rather shocking reallife experiences individual Nova Scotians endured because of that crisis and during the campaign.
Why were the Liberals defeated? An eight-year record that was less than sterling and they couldn’t defend; a new leader Nova Scotians didn’t seem to warm to; a campaign that stumbled from the start and never seemed to regain its footing; and the old standby, Nova Scotians felt it was time for a change.
Why were the Tories elected? They made health care the issue of the race, and then offered solutions to fix it. Their leader had the discipline to pound home the Tories’ health-care message. And, they executed a near-flawless campaign.
So, while Nova Scotians did indeed defeat a government, this time it seems like a good many were electing one.