Ii was the late great screenwriter William Goldman who uttered the well-known phrase “Nobody knows anything.” The writer behind film classics like All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride was referring to the Hollywood movie industry, but I’ve often thought that same sentiment can be applied to observers of Nova Scotia politics – and that includes me. Eleven years on I’m still trying to figure out why Darrell Dexter’s NDP government was swept from power after only four years in office.

Last week’s election was widely described as historic – both for the size of the PC victory and the drastic drop in voter turnout. As discussed here the seat count and percentage of popular vote need to be put in perspective, given that only 23.8 percent of eligible voters chose the Tim Houston-led party. Nevertheless, the PCs did win big, getting more votes than they received in 2021 – this despite the fact that other incumbent provincial governments were either losing (New Brunswick last month and Manitoba last year) or seeing their margins of victory decreased (British Columbia and Saskatchewan).   

Much of the instant post-election analysis has attributed the PC sweep to their success in hanging the albatross of Justin Trudeau around the neck of Nova Scotia Liberal leader Zach Churchill. As political scientist Jeff Macleod of Mount St. Vincent put it, Nova Scotia Liberals were “successfully linked by their opponents to the federal Trudeau Liberals.” This may well be the case, but there is some contrary evidence to take into account.

In New Brunswick, for example, the anti-Trudeau provincial Liberal strategy did not prevent Liberal Susan Holt from ousting Tory Blaine Higgs, long a practitioner of the anti-Trudeau arts. Nor did it stop Andy Fillmore, eight-year member of Trudeau’s parliamentary caucus, from being elected Mayor of Halifax. And the Trudeau-Liberal connection isn’t hurting the Liberal Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, who remains comfortably ahead of the PCs in recent polls. 

So maybe relying on voter disenchantment with Trudeau isn’t enough in itself, it must be reinforced to be effective. In support of this theory, we need only look at Houston’s bickering with Ottawa going back many months on many fronts, discussed here, with the carbon tax eventually becoming the favourite scapegoat, along with complaints about the non-existent wave of asylum seekers and the nickel-and-diming on flood-proofing the Isthmus of Chignecto.   

Furthermore, fed bashing, even when it makes the basher look petty and dishonest, was not the only thing the PCs had going for them. Ironically, some of these advantages came courtesy of the Trudeau government. 

  • Tradition and incumbency. Governments in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and B.C. that were either defeated or returned with fewer seats, had been in office for two terms or more. The Nova Scotia PCs had been in power a little over three years when Houston called the snap election. With the inexplicable (to me) exception of the Dexter NDP government, Nova Scotians have traditionally given governments at least two terms in office, something Houston played on with the refrain that he was “just getting started.” With the exception again of the NDP in 2013 and the Liberals in 2024 incumbency is also a big factor. The PCs went into the election with 29 incumbents – already a majority in the legislature – to eight incumbents for the Liberals, five for the NDP and one Independent.   
  • Healthy finances. The PC government has been blessed with increased revenues and it has been wiling to spend it. According to Statistics Canada, revenue went up by 17.3 percent between 2021 and 2023. Among other things, the revenue jump enabled the PCs to increase employee compensation by 18.9 percent over two years, avoiding the kind of labour-management strife that befell their predecessor Liberal and NDP governments.
  • Money for bandaids. Although homelessness increased and access to primary care deteriorated, the Conservatives talked a good game and were able to be generous with their bandaid solutions. They increased health care spending faster than any other province and put money into a variety of programs for the unhoused, while deflecting public flak about homeless encampments onto municipalities, especially Halifax. The most recent data show the poverty rate increasing to the highest in the country. But it remains lower than most years the Liberals were in power and the PCs have been able to flaunt their progressive credentials by introducing a school lunch program as a response to child poverty. There will likely be federal cost sharing to help pay for the school lunch program, just as there has been for improvements to day care.
  • Lots of help from the feds. Unlike the ill-fated NDP government whose term in office was marked by reduced transfers from the Harper Conservative government, the Houston PCs have done well, with major federal transfers – health and social transfers and equalization – increasing 31.8 percent between 2021 and 2024. On a per-capita basis, Nova Scotia had the third highest increase of any province over that period.  The feds have also helped to keep power rates down by providing a loan guarantee enabling Nova Scotia Power to spread out the recovery of costs incurred by the delay in electricity from the Muskrat Falls project.
  • Population growth. The federal Liberals should also get credit (or blame if you prefer) for the unprecedented growth in Nova Scotia’s population – more than 80,000 since the PCs came to power. Zach Churchill tried to capitalize on public concern, discussed here, that because of Houston’s wish to double the population by 2060 growth is happening too fast, putting pressure on housing and health services. There’s no evidence Churchill’s efforts paid off for the Liberals and it may in fact have backfired. Dalhousie sociologist Karen Foster, who does research on rural development, told the CBC that rural communities are excited about population growth.    
  • Great ambition. Quarterly polling by Narrative Research turned up support for the Conservatives in the 45 to 50 percent range since the beginning of 2023, with the pre-writ September, 2024 poll putting them at 53 percent, to 24 percent for the Liberals and 19 for the NDP (accurate to within 3.5 percentage points 95 times out of 100). So the Conservatives came into the campaign riding high in the polls, with a wealth of incumbents, financial and organizational advantages over their opponents and a well-established strategy built around attacking the provincial Liberals through their federal counterparts.Their ambition was not just to coast to another majority but to win every seat in the legislature, motivation demonstrated by Houston’s late campaign fund-raising appeal which declared “there isn’t a constituency in this province that the PC party can’t win.” The pitch asked for donations to the 55 for 55 fund – $55 “to fuel our get out the vote efforts.” 
  • Hard-nosed tactics. Evidence that the PCs would go all out to crush opposition would have been apparent to anyone following the party’s daily campaign bulletins. A few were about policy differences but the majority were attacks on parties, party leaders or individual candidates. Out of 30-odd such missives,15 were aimed at the NDP or its candidates, indicating that with Liberal support dropping across the province, the PCs saw the main obstacle to maximizing their seat count was the NDP winning three-way races in the Halifax region.The tactic may have worked. Most polls during the campaign (and there were a surprising number of them) showed NDP support in 25 to 28 percent range, but it ended up just over 22 percent. The NDP did pick up two seats from the Liberals in HRM, but the Conservatives gained five.

All of the above factors – and likely other things I haven’t mentioned – were enough to return the PCs to power with their whopping majority. More than half of those who took the trouble to vote were willing to overlook the broken promises on things like fixed election dates, coastal protection, elected school boards and better freedom of information rules. They also seemed indifferent to the PC government maintaining a cosy relationship with developers while renters were getting squeezed, or Houston’s tendency to take care of friends, hand out sole source contracts, privatize health care or centralize control at the cabinet level. And even though, despite massive overspending of health budgets, the number of people without access to primary care continued to rise, the majority of voters were willing to give the PCs more time to “fix” health care. 

Doubtless  many of those who voted PC won’t agree that the quibbles above are real shortcomings. But there may be others who voted PC while unaware of what the Houston government has been up to, given sparse media coverage of provincial politics in recent years and the marginalization of the House of Assembly, as discussed here. The fact that the PCs sailed through the 20 months leading up to the election at or near 50 percent in the Narrative Research polls suggests that any attention most Nova Scotians were giving to politics was focussed negatively on Ottawa.  

While mindful that the “Nobody knows anything”  rule still applies, I offer the following theory. For the PCs, timing was everything. They called the election when they still had Trudeau to kick around, while avoiding any further fallout from thw Poilievre-led federal Conservatives. Although they found themselves politically on the wrong side of rising apprehension about immigration they went to the polls before the issue became more pressing. They got the election out of the way just as unemployment is set to rise and government revenues to fall – never mind whatever Trump-related chaos comes along. And they were able to keep flogging the carbon tax issue before more people realized it was not only good policy but good for the pocketbook. Throw in tax cuts we probably can’t afford and they were off to the races.  

William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” quip was advice to fellow writers to stick with their ideas about good stories instead of trying to figure out what would sell. Running against Trudeau and the carbon tax sold well for the Nova Scotia Tories in 2024 but don’t expect a sequel. In the years ahead what will matter are a party’s ideas and values – and the bloated PC ranks, without their favourite target, start off with a deficit in that department.

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