Voters may have given the Houston Progressive Conservatives a renewed mandate, but it was non-voters who made possible the Blue Wave that supposedly swept over Nova Scotia on Tuesday. Yes, the PCs picked up 52.5 percent of the votes cast and will occupy 78 percent of the seats in the legislature – but the much-heralded historic landslide was mainly the result of a stunning drop in voter turnout.
Voter turnout for this election was drastically lower, at 45.3 percent, well down from the 55 per cent of eligible voters who cast ballots in 2021. Based on analysis of election night numbers, turnout declined in 52 of the 55 seats. And although population growth of some 80,000 contributed to a 21,000 increase in the the number of eligible voters since 2021, votes cast fell by nearly 66,000 since three years ago.
Proponents of the Blue Wave will legitimately point out that the Tories went from 38.4 percent of the vote in 2021 to 52.5 percent this time, while increasing their seat count by nine. But the PCs managed to get just 24,983 more votes than they received in 2021, their huge margin of victory stemming from the fact their opponents lost votes in bushels.
For the Liberals it was a shocking total of nearly 74,000 – down almost 50 percent from the last provincial election. The NDP, Greens and Independents lost a combined 16,000 votes from their 2021 totals. Best guess is that instead of switching to the PCs, most of those 90,000 likely stayed home. Some may even have gone out to vote but gave up trying because information cards telling them where to go were cancelled because of the postal strike.
Although there is debate in academic circles about the significance of voter turnout to the health of a democracy, conventional wisdom is that low voter turnout is an indication of apathy and a challenge to democratic legitimacy. Low turnout can also be seen as a warning to the winning political party to avoid behaving too arrogantly in government lest they arouse the sleeping giant. Let’s take a look at the slumberer.
Vast majority not Tory
According to Elections Nova Scotia, 788,427 people were eligible to vote in this week’s election. Only 357,048 exercised their right to vote, producing a real, but lamentable historic event, the 45.3 percent turnout. Of the 357,048 votes cast, the Conservatives received 187,456, which works out to 23.8 percent of eligible voters.
The numbers suggest that the Houston government’s vote share and the PC dominance in the legislature does not reflect a wholehearted embrace of the party, with just 23.8 percent of eligible voters deciding to cast a vote for them. That’s up a few percentage points from the 2021 election, but nevertheless means that less than one-in-four eligible voters chose to vote for the PCs. Twenty-one percent of eligible voters opted to vote for the other parties or independents, but the majority of eligible Nova Scotians – 54.7 percent – decided not to vote at all.
On election night, some TV commentators were comparing the PC showing with the 1984 election, when John Buchanan won 42 seats. The Houston PCs’ 43 seats were seen as beating the Buchanan record – even though Buchanan’s 42 seats were won when there were only 52 seats in the House of Assembly. The Houston PCs also topped Buchanan’s 1984 score of 50.6 percent of the vote. However, there is one significant difference.
Buchanan’s PCs received more votes than Houston’s – and from a much smaller population. The 209,298 votes racked up by the Buchanan PCs amounted to 34.0 percent of eligible voters, compared with just 23.8 percent for Houston. The John Savage Liberal government which swept out the PCs in 1993 did even better. Its vote total of 237,493 was an unheard of (by current standards) 36.2 percent of eligible voters.
As voter turnout dropped over subsequent years, the winner’s percentage of eligible voters has gone down. But it remained around 26 percent through the majority governments of John Hamm (1999), Darrell Dexter (2009) and Stephen McNeil (2013). The percentage dropped to 20.9 percent for McNeil in 2017, close to the 21.2 percent of eligible voters that brought Houston to power in 2021.
So in terms of the share of eligible voters, this week’s “landslide” represents an improvement over the past two elections, but is still below the trend that prevailed from 1984 through 2013, as shown in the table.
| Winner and Year | Votes Received | Percentage of eligible voters |
| PCs 1984 | 209,298 | 34.0% |
| Liberals 1993 | 237,493 | 36.2% |
| PCs 1999 | 169,383 | 26.5% |
| NDP 2009 | 186,556 | 26.1% |
| Liberals 2013 | 190,112 | 26.8% |
| Liberals 2017 | 158,383 | 20.9% |
| PCs 2021 | 162,473 | 21.2% |
| PCs 2024 | 187,456 | 23.8% |
Source: Elections Nova Scotia
On election night, TV commentators were throwing around the term history-making to describe the PC win. But if you look at all of the recent history, it becomes clear this is not a government with any exceptional mandate from the people.
It can be argued that the way in which a government fulfills its mandate rests not only on seats won, but on its support from the population as a whole. With the backing of only 23.8 percent of eligible voters in this election, the Houston government has a smaller mandate than most of the majority governments that have preceded it over the last 40 years. It should conduct itself accordingly.
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Point well made but my guess is that Houston will not act “accordingly”.
Don’t overlook the effect of timing. Houston committed to a fixed-date vote midyear 2025 but that was going to be too close to a federal election. Who knows, the most unpopular Liberal in the land might not even be around by then. So forget the fixed date. Get your team, your money and your ad ready when the timing looks best. Too bad for the Liberals and NDP who thought they had another eight months to prepare. As for the voters, November is a lousy time of year to call an election unless there is a genuine crisis that fixes public attention. What really explains the low turnout and the rout is Houston’s pure unadulterated cynicism. If only he had any redeeming qualities.