Column for June 25, 2006
Our school board’s sorry for … everything
Geoff Cainen, the coordinator of education quality and accountability (whatever that may be) at the Halifax Regional School Board, clearly believes in inclusion. As he groveled to reporters last week: “If this question in any way has offended anyone with a Muslim background, or Canadian Forces, or anyone else who has read the question and has taken offence to it, the board is certainly apologizing.”
Phew… What could have inspired such an abject, one-size-fits-all wea culpa to anyone anywhere who might have been upset, or whose mother could be, or whose grandchildren might someday be, lo unto the seventh generation?
All the fuss, it turns out, concerned a take-home essay question Sir John A MacDonald High School teacher Kevin McNair assigned his Grade 12 global history students as a part of their final exam.
Students were asked to choose one of two put-yourself-in-the-shoes essay topics. The first focused on third world poverty and was not considered offensive, the poor, I guess, being generic and having always been with us. The second question, however, raised a does-this-mean-what-I-think flag for one student who complained to the Halifax Herald that the question made it seem like Islamic and terrorist somehow belonged together, like, well… graduation and prom dress.
“This will be the story of a modern-day terrorist from the Middle East,” McNair’s question began. “You must be Islamic…”
Essentially, McNair wanted his students to use their research skills, intelligence and imagination to visualize the world from the point of view of an Islamic youth, trying to understand how their personal history and environment might lead them to join a terrorist organization and carry out a mission, perhaps “against the Canadians in Afghanistan.”
From a pedagogical perspective, this is a challenging, educational and, I believe, entirely appropriate question.
It’s certainly not a unique idea. The New Yorker recently published a short story by British author Martin Amis in which he explored the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers by imagining the last day of Mohammad Atta’s life. And American novelist John Updike’s compelling current novel, Terrorist, tries to get inside the teenaged mind of a New Jersey Muslim boy who finds the certainties missing in his own life in religion and then is drawn, almost accidentally but inexorably, into transforming himself into a human bomb.
McNair’s was not an easy assignment.
In order to write an effective essay, students would have had to research any number of important-to-understand topics: the history of the Middle East; current events in Iraq and Iran; the ongoing, never-ending standoff between Israel and the Palestinians; relations between Muslim countries and the West; everyday life in Islamic countries that have spawned terrorists; the history of Islam generally and, more specifically, how some Islamic polemicists have shaped and bent its teachings to justify killings and suicide bombings; and on and on…
Students were then asked to take what they’d learned, put themselves inside the head of someone whose life they probably couldn’t otherwise comprehend, and then explain why they are who they are.
The real issue for the student who complained and for the school board official who caved faster than a bunker-busted, bombed-out building, seems to be that McNair shouldn’t have linked terrorism with Islam.
Forget for a moment 9/11, Madrid, the London subway bombings, the arrests of 17 Muslim men and boys in Toronto this month… Pretend that terrorism and Islam — or at least some people’s twisted idea of Islam — are unconnected.
Don’t offend.
Don’t learn.
But, you might argue, Islamic isn’t the only terrorist variant. What about the IRA, or the Tamil Tigers, or Timothy McVeigh and his American right-wing wing nuts or, lest we forget, Canada’s own home-grown terrorists, the FLQ, or…?
Unfortunately, switching to the IRA might — heaven forbid — upset the Irish among us.
Well, why not just a generic terrorist?… Uh oh, should we even call them “terrorists?”… I mean someone who considers himself a freedom fighter might take offence?... Er, well, OK, how about an individual… growing up… somewhere?
Or maybe we should just forget the whole thing and simply go back to testing students’ abilities to memorize textbook dates and battles. Who could be offended by that?
And if anyone is?
Well, I’m sure Mr. Cainen would be happy to apologize to them too.
Column for June 18, 2006
Baillie, Batherson blather
while Rodney burns
If you want to know why the Conservatives managed to lose this election while slightly increasing their share of the popular vote and winning the most seats, you need only rewind and replay the what-me-worry, see-me-smile, that’s-me-still-smiling election-night blather of two of its key backroom operatives — Jamie Baillie, the ghost of governments past, and Rob Batherson, the puppetmeister of campaign present.
At various times during CBC-TV’s broadcast of Tuesday night’s election results, journalists asked Baillie and Batherson to explain what had gone wrong with the Tory campaign. Something had. The Conservatives did not choose to call this election at this time in order to eliminate the advantage (with one seat vacant and one independent MLA voting with the government) of an effective majority; elect even fewer MLAs than they had going in; and allow the NDP to neatly position itself as a government in waiting.
With the polls closed, it would have been easy enough for Baillie and Batherson to be candid about the miscalculations and missteps the party had made in seeking a quick mandate for its new leader, and how it had compounded that screw-up by keeping Rodney MacDonald on such a tight verbal leash he often seemed out of his depth answering what-day-is-it? queries.
They could have trusted viewers with adult talk. While legitimately pointing out that the party had increased its share of the popular vote, they could have acknowledged tactical mistakes and promised to learn from them, thus ultimately making the party worthy of the majority voters denied it this time.
They could have. But they didn’t. Instead, they spooled out more vacuous, I’m-so-proud, isn’t-life-grand, never-answer-the-question campaign spin, which, in many ways, is what got the Tories into trouble in the first place.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to know why the New Democrats managed to win this campaign while losing the election, you could cue up CTV’s election-night interview with NDP chief of staff Dan O’Connor.
Why, veteran reporter Rick Grant quite reasonably wanted to know, couldn’t the NDP ever jump that final hurdle and form a government?
O’Connor could have ignored the question, as Baillie and Batherson did, and babbled on about breakthroughs in the rural mainland. Instead, he… wait for it… answered the question. Thoughtfully. As if Grant and his viewers might be interested in the answer. Which, according to O’Connor, was that the NDP had shot itself in the foot in Cape Breton 25 years ago, and had still not fully recovered. In 1981, then-NDP leader Jeremy Akerman abandoned party and principles to take a job with Buchanan’s Tories, devastating its core of support there for more than a generation. That O’Connor himself would open that old wound and — worse — acknowledge it still festered would probably get him drummed out of the Tory backroom brigade.
But O’Connor’s answer had the advantage of making it appear that the NDP respects the intelligence of voters. Which may explain why more voters responded to its message this time. And why Baillie and Batherson may have their work cut out if the hope to save Rodney MacDonald’s government from itself — and them.
**
Some final random election reflections:
Even though Bill Black
has to be disillusioned with electoral politics after having lost a Tory leadership many believe he should have won and a seat in the legislature most pundits said was his, I hope doesn’t give up. Nova Scotia could use more of his common sense and even his occasional bull-in-the-china-shop approach to issues…
The Sore Loser Award goes to defeated Waverley-Fall River-Beaverbank Tory MLA Gary Hines
, who not only refused to congratulate his opponent but also ominously hinted his Tories might now cut off the riding for voting the wrong way…
The Liberals’ best hope for a quick recovery from last week’s electoral debacle would be to talk Danny Graham
into taking the job again. Graham, you may recall, quit the leadership two years ago to be with his wife, who died recently of cancer. While he still has a young family to care for and may not be willing to return to the rough and tumble of politics so soon, his presence could instantly transform the party from laughingstock back to legitimate.
www.stephenkimber.com
Column for Jun 11, 2006
Ignoring the elephant in the election campaign
Brian Crowley and I do not agree on much. Crowley is the head of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a right-wing think tank funded largely by big business… and I am not. He believes, if I may simplify just a smidge, that what is best for business is more than good enough for the rest of us … and I do not.
But Crowley, in a recent column in the Halifax Herald, raised what for me is the ignored elephant-in-the-election-campaign issue — how should we be spending our one-time, now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t bonanza of offshore royalties to get the best long-term bang for our natural resources buck?
While Crowley and I would probably still disagree on the broader goals for those revenues — I’m guessing he’d like to see lower corporate taxes and I’d like to improve our collective social safety net — we do agree our political leaders are squandering a “unique opportunity” to get things right so we’ll have the opportunity, and fiscal ability, to make those down-the-road decisions for ourselves.
The promise-frenzy that has characterized the platforms of all three major political parties in this election campaign, in fact, is largely fueled by the wishful expectation that those ephemeral, one-time royalty payments will magically transform themselves into year-after-year-to-forever riches. They won’t.
We get royalty payments from the Sable Offshore Energy project based on how much of our non-renewable natural resources the Sable partners suck up from under the oceans. They can only suck them up — and give us our share — once.
According to the provincial department of energy, Nova Scotians will receive $143.8 million in royalties this fiscal year, and another $288 million next year.
Sounds good… until you find out that the energy department’s own long-term estimates indicate the gas will run dry sometime around “the middle part of the next decade,” and that total royalties, including those already in our pockets, will range from $1.2–¬2 billion. (Given the generally disappointing results from Sable so far, some analysts suggest revenues will end up on the low end of that scale, or worse.) Even assuming a best-case scenario, the reality is that Sable royalties will peak in the next few years and then decline to nothing.
That means the gas-goosed annual revenue that is encouraging our politicians to promise us the stars, moon and an HST rebate on heating oil is coming from money that won’t be around to fund those programs in the future. We will have squandered any potential long-term benefit from investing our windfall in order to fund ongoing programs that won’t be sustainable when the gas runs out.
Crowley believes our current politicians should have learned from former premier John Hamm’s “courageous” decision to quietly slap down on our $12-billion provincial debt the entire $830-million advance against royalties he got last year after signing the Atlantic Accord. By doing that, Hamm freed up close to $80-million a year that otherwise would have disappeared into the banking ether as interest payments on the debt. That rescued revenue, of course, can now be used to fund programs that matter to Nova Scotians — on an ongoing basis.
Paying down the debt isn’t the only — and may not even be the best — way to put offshore royalties to good use. It may make sense to invest in certain kind of infrastructure development to create long-term benefits for the province, for example, or targeted education projects designed to help give the coming generation the tools they need to succeed. There may even be instances in which the program spending being touted by our political leaders actually makes sense too.
The problem, of course, is that we haven’t talked about those alternatives during the current election campaign. Our political leaders have been too busy making promises they know our next government, or the one after that, won’t be able to keep.
“There’s no doubt,” says Crowley, “that the economic position of the province has improved markedly. There is more money for government to spend. But what happens when the boom ends, and it will? We have a unique opportunity right now to develop a sustainable economic policy, and our politicians aren’t talking about it. That’s a shame.”
Brian Crowley and I can agree on that.
From Quill & Quire online
HarperCollins Canada's cocktail party
at the HarperCollins cocktail party kicking off Book Expo Canada 2006 in Toronto June 10, 2006.
Column for June 4, 2006
Proud Rodney, Frank Francis and Diligent Darrell
If no clear winner emerged from the primordial swamp of Thursday night’s party leaders’ debate, the luminescent loser, at least from my somewhat jaundiced point of view, was our vacuous wind-up doll of a premier.
Rodney I-am-proud MacDonald seemed so mired in I-am-very-proud message-track mode that he couldn’t be prouder to be so proud of being proud of… What was the question again?
Because he was extremely proud of that question too.
And positive? Did he mention how positively positive he was feeling about being proud of being positive because of his party’s proudly positive four-year program for the future.
See, I’m smiling too. I can smile and be proud at the same time. And positive.
If the other parties wanted to talk about the past, well, Rodney wasn’t even going to say Ernie Fage’s name. Who? La-de-da-de-da, I can’t he-e-e-ea-a-a-r you…
No, Proud Rodney was going to stay positive. Not that Ernie Fage wasn’t a positively fine fellow, of course. He could even be back in a Proud Rodney cabinet after the election, Rodney sort-of-said later. But Ernie’s name wasn’t programmed into Rodney’s memory bank of proud, positive phrases, so, during the debate itself, he could only answer a question about why Ernie really quit his job as development minister after cabinet approved some questionable loans to government buddies by saying he was… proud as punch about his government’s positive record of economic development. Proud and positive. Proudly positive. Positively proud.
Is this debate over yet? Can I stop smiling now?
Liberal leader Francis MacKenzie, despite sometimes coming across as a sweaty-palmed used car salesman desperately eager to close a bad deal before its time, was at least in command of his material. He could not only articulate what was actually in his party’s platform but he was also able to distinguish it from his too often too similar rivals. MacKenzie knew why he was against eliminating the HST on home heating oil, and why he thought that tax breaks to keep graduates in the province made more sense than lowering tuition, and why the debt mattered. You didn’t even have to agree with his arguments to acknowledge he made them well.
Coming into the debate, Frank Francis had been written off by much of the media and many in his own party as a gaffe-prone blowhard who would be long gone before the next provincial election. Measured against those subterranean expectations — which is to say to damn him with faint praise — MacKenzie did well enough. He did not lose himself any votes he didn’t have, and he may have even picked up a few floaters.
Diligent Darrell Dexter was expected to perform better than the others — he, after all, was the only leader who’d taken part in the last such debate — and he did, up to a not very sharp point.
Like MacDonald, he suffered from the transparently manipulative mania for staying on message — a better deal for today’s families, five goals for Nova Scotia families, a plan you can count on and blah blah blah — regardless of the question he was actually asked. In the process, however, he managed to do a better job than either of the others of articulating a coherent vision for his party.
But he wasn’t very good in the clinches. He seemed to get caught out, for example, when Rodney MacDonald countered his criticism of the Tories’ health care failures with the you-knew-it-was-coming-Darrell-so-why-didn’t-you-have-a-better-answer fact that Dexter’s party had voted for the government’s health care budgets for the last two years running. And he didn’t effectively respond to MacKenzie’s dismissal of the NDP’s plan to increase the number of nursing home beds either.
His own questioning wasn’t much sharper. Although he can’t be blamed for the fact that Francis MacKenzie twice bulled into the china shop of a Dexter question about why Ernie Fage really quit his cabinet position — effectively letting MacDonald off the hook — the question itself seemed more like an opposition leader’s Question-Period question than a premier-in-waiting’s attempt to force the premier-in-power to explain why the government had set up such a friends-and-family slush fund in the first place.
And so it went.
Doesn’t it make you proud all over?
Darrell Dexter profile from the Coast
The Possible Dream?
Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats are no longer the “free-floating failures” of Nova Scotia politics. But can the NDP take the next step and actually win power? Stephen Kimber asks the question.
“Got it!” the young woman announces triumphantly as she breezes back into the NDP’s storefront office off Wolfville’s main drag, holding aloft a roll of inch-wide orange ribbon.
“Told you,” King’s South candidate David Mangle says to no one in particular. “Anything you need you can get at the Home Hardware.”
It’s 4:25 on a warm, wanting-to-be-sunny Wednesday afternoon, and the buzz, such as it is, is that Darrell Dexter will be here soon. It is the third day of the first full week of campaigning for the June 13th provincial general election, and Dexter is spending this afternoon on a minivan tour of the Annapolis Valley, planting the seeds of constituency campaign offices in Greenwood, Wolfville and Windsor.
He’s already done his main media event of the day— a morning photo-op at Northwood seniors’ centre in Halifax. Dexter used the setting, carefully stage-managed to win precious air time on the supper-hour TV newscasts, to attack his Conservative opponents for breaking a 1999 promise to expand long-term care facilities in the province. The theme for today, and for much of the first stage of the campaign, will be that the Tories—who’ve filled the weeks leading up to the election call stealing the most popular promises from the NDP’s platform—can’t be trusted to actually keep them.
The Halifax reporters, having already been fed the basis of the story du jour, don’t bother to accompany Dexter to the Valley. One the one hand, that makes sense—constituency office openings are usually just more camera-friendly grip-and-grin events—but, on the other, it doesn’t. The future of Rodney MacDonald’s Conservative government—not to forget the NDP’s, and perhaps Darell Dexter’s own electoral fate—will almost certainly be decided in a half dozen rural ridings like this one in King’s South.
Once you venture out beyond the NDP’s seemingly impenetrable electoral fortress of Halifax, in fact, King’s South is as promising as it gets for Darrell Dexter’s prospects of becoming premier.
The riding is not only home to Acadia University in socially progressive, Officially Sustainable Wolfville but there’s also fertile electoral ground for vote-tilling in the nearby, ever-expanding exurbia around the shopping-centred community of New Minas. In the last provincial election, the NDP’s David Mangle finished second here, 553 votes behind Tory cabinet minister David Morse and 112 ahead of a popular Liberal candidate.
On the face of it, Mangle’s prospects seem better this time. Morse, a controversial minister of community services whose resignation the opposition has frequently demanded over the last three years, is a polarizing figure who may repel as well as attract. Ray Savage, the Liberal candidate, faces the double whammy of not only being less well known than his predecessor but also running for a party whose new leader is not especially popular, even among Liberal faithful.
For his part, Mangle, one of the co-founders of the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op, has buffed up his personal political profile since the 2003 election. As more than one person in his headquarters is eager to tell me today, he recently won a seat on town council with the most votes of any candidate in the race.
Mangle, who has spent the early part of this afternoon knocking on doors in a trailer park behind the Sobeys in New Minas, is cautiously optimistic. “We were 500 votes shy last election,” he acknowledges, “but it was my first time around, and we’ve learned from that.” One of the lessons, he says, is the importance of getting the vote out. “We took this poll by over 60 per cent,” he says of the area around the trailer park, “but only 30 per cent of the eligible voters actually voted. So we know we have to be more efficient this time, get to more doors during this campaign.” He pauses, repeats what is already the local campaign’s rallying cry: “If we had gotten just 12 more votes in each of the polls last time, I’d have won.”
Electing an NDP MLA in King’s South is not without precedent. Bob Levy, the personally popular son of a former Conservative politician, won the riding for the New Democrats in 1984. Four years later, with John Buchanan’s Conservative government under fire for corruption and patronage, there was optimistic talk King’s South might become the building block for an NDP electoral breakthrough in rural Nova Scotia. Instead, the wily Buchanan coupled announcing the 1988 election campaign with appointing Levy—who’d been going through marital difficulties—a judge. That effectively undercut NDP attacks on the government’s patronage record, handed King’s South back to the Tories and consigned the NDP to yet another decade on the margins of political power.
Even without having to cope with a Machiavellian maneuvre like that, the NDP’s prospects in King’s South this June remain problematic at best. Despite the controversies incumbent David Morse may have stirred in Halifax, most independent observers say he’s viewed locally as a “very active, very visible” constituency politician who will be difficult to unseat. And, if the Liberals do lose support, they say, there’s at least as good a chance those ballots will end up in Morse’s tally as in Mangle’s.
Which is why every vote counts. And why David Mangle is keen to make sure his leader’s first campaign visit to the riding today goes well. Which, in turn, is why he wanted that roll of orange ribbon.
After the ceremonies inside, Mangle and Dexter will step outside the office, someone will stretch a length of the newly purchased, party-coloured orange ribbon across the doorway and the two politicians will smile and cut the ribbon to officially open the campaign office. With luck, the reporter-photographer from the local weekly will snap a picture and it will end up in the paper, tangible proof of his leader’s interest in King’s South.
“Before the election last time, [campaign organizers in Halifax] said we’ll try and get some provincial support down to you,” Mangle remembers. “But then they circled the wagons around Halifax and that was the end of that. This time it looks like we’ll get an election-day organizer as well as a canvass organizer [from provincial headquarters]. That tells me they see this riding as winnable, and one they want to win.”
Dexter’s advance team—two women, one from Alberta, the other from New Brunswick—finally arrive at Mangle’s headquarters with news that the leader’s swing through the Annapolis Valley is on schedule.
“I’ve heard that before,” Mangle says with a smile.
A podium, festooned with orange balloons, has been set up in a corner of the small headquarters’ office in front of a room divider backdrop. The divider is festooned with NDP-orange balloons, the lectern dressed up with posters touting Mangle and Dexter. About a dozen people, most of whom know each other, have drifted into the office now, and they take up positions around the room in order to provide an audience in case the TV cameras do show up for Dexter’s speech.
They don’t. But Dexter himself breezes in a few minutes later, less a rock star arriving for his performance and more everyone’s favourite uncle who got time off work for today’s family barbecue. Despite the tailored suit and the reality he’s a sophisticated lawyer-politician, Darrell Dexter manages to exude a comfortable-shoe, ordinary-guy charm that almost seems apolitical. And genuine.
No silver spoon socialist, Dexter was born in Milton, Queen’s County, one of six kids of Elvin, a sheet-metal worker-dad, and Florence, a grocery store clerk-mom. His parents, he told one interviewer, “lived from pay cheque to pay cheque, and anything that upset their routine—you know, their ability to pay for heating oil and electricity, buying the kids new sneakers before they went back to school—anything that upset that, that was an issue for them.”
Dexter joined the NDP in 1979 during Alexa McDonough’s first failed bid for a federal seat in Halifax when the party was still the none-of-the-above choice for most provincial voters, and has supported the party ever since—even as his own career path caromed like a pinball from local news reporter to naval officer to teacher to lawyer to Dartmouth city councilor to member of the legislature, and the party went back and forth like a ping pong ball between Pyrrhic success and moral victory, never quite managing to convince voters to take it seriously.
During much of the 1980s and nineties, the NDP suffered from what Acadia University political scientist Ian Stewart describes as “free-floating failure.” Even after many of the traditional hobbles —the I’m-a-Liberal-because-my-father-was-a-Liberal syndrome, or the province’s ingrained patronage culture—had largely disappeared as electoral impediments, the NDP was stuck with a self-fulfilling reputation that they were losers.
That all changed in 1998 when a “perfect storm in reverse” catapulted the provincial party—and Darrell Dexter—from electoral bystanders to Official Opposition.
It actually began the year before, says Stewart, when the federal NDP, led by former provincial leader Alexa McDonough, surprised itself, the province and the country by capturing six of 11 Nova Scotia seats in the House of Commons. It was, says Stewart, the result of a fortuitous collision of time and circumstance. McDonough not only had the native-daughter factor working in her party’s favour, but “voters here saw the Reform Party as hopelessly western. The Conservatives, who’d been practically wiped out in 1993, were still non-contenders. And, by 1995, the Liberals had swung hard to the right. That created a vacuum at the federal level that the NDP was able to fill.”
The momentum from that federal victory carried over into the 1998 provincial election when voters—still angry with the provincial Tories for the excesses of the Buchanan years and unhappy with a Liberal government in such disarray it had tossed over its own leader—decided to throw caution to the winds and vote NDP too.
On election night, the Liberals and the NDP ended up in a dead heat with 19 seats each, leaving the Tories in third place with 14. Although Russell MacLellan’s Liberals managed to cling to minority power for the next year, they—and the NDP—ended up on the outside looking in when John Hamm’s Conservatives swept back into power with a majority in 1999. Still the NDP had “reset the bar” of public expectations. It remained the official opposition and, three years later, after voters reduced the Tories back to a minority, the second place NDP once again held the balance of power with 15 seats.
While the party has been a legitimate electoral contender in every election since 1998, the big hurdle remains—can Darrell Dexter form even a minority government after this election.
“Anything is possible,” Stewart allows cautiously. He doesn’t sound optimisitic, although he concedes the current electoral landscape is “probably as good as it gets from the NDP’s perspective.”
For starters, there’s the fact that Rodney MacDonald won the Conservative leadership. MacDonald, a rural Tory in the free-spending John Buchanan mode who has seemed out of his intellectual and strategic depth in the first days of this campaign, is unlikely to pose the kind of circle-the-wagons threat to the NDP’s Halifax power base his leadership rival Bill Black might have.
To make prospects even brighter for the NDP, the Liberals are in a mess. As the campaign began, party leader Francis MacKenzie remained largely pinned down in his own riding, struggling to win his own seat, while many of the party’s traditional power brokers were content to sit quietly on the sidelines, waiting for him to lose so they can start the rebuilding process again.
Darrell Dexter, on the other hand, is his party’s best asset. Michael MacMillan, the chair of the political science department of Mount Saint Vincent University, recently told Canadian Press that “Dexter has many of the same strengths that John Hamm had—a very pleasant personality from small-town Nova Scotia, someone who goes over very well in front of gatherings.”
A low-key moderate who has nudged the party ever closer to the political centre without straying far from its progressive roots, the policies Dexter’s NDP has championed—from public auto insurance, to improved treatment for seniors, to the elimination of the HST on essentials—transcend traditional political labels. “I don’t think we’re moving to the centre so much as the centre is moving to us,” Dexter insists. “I kind of joke with people: do Nova Scotians want Progressive Conservatives or conservative progressives?”
Dexter recalls a phone call he got from the secretary of the Centennial Branch Legion in Dartmouth. “He said, ‘Darrell, I know you’ve been going all over the province with your petition on long-term care? Why don’t you bring it over here?’ I said, ‘Well, you know, I understand and I respect the Legion’s rules against politicking on Legion property.’ There was silence at the end of the line, and then he said, ‘Well, Darrell, we don’t consider this a political issue. This is a common sense issue; it’s the right thing to do.’” Dexter smiles. “So I went right over and dropped off copies of the petition and let them distribute them.”
Dexter probably could not have done a better job of steering the NDP through the tricky shoals of minority government—propping up John Hamm’s Tories with timely compromises while wrangling concessions for a variety of key NDP—and public—priorities. But political parties are rarely rewarded for playing nice, so now Dexter must now find a way to separate himself from the Tories.
New Conservative leader Rodney MacDonald has made that easier—and harder. Easier because MacDonald is no John Hamm, and harder because MacDonald’s first throne speech, budget and platform rip off many of the NDP’s key promises, including elimination of the HST on home heating oil.
That’s one reason Dexter’s focus today is on broken Tory promises. During his brief speech to the faithful at Mangle’s constituency office, Dexter reiterates his morning attack on the Tories for failing to follow through on their long-term care commitment, and stays on message with his own rural-friendly promise. An NDP government, he announces, will introduce a $250 tax credit for volunteer firefighters. It’s a promise, he pointedly tells the audience, the Tories themselves made seven years before but never kept. “It was an excellent idea,” Dexter says. “It would have been excellent if the Conservatives had kept the promise. They did not.” The NDP, he says, will.
But will the promise of kept promises be enough to help David Mangle pull in those 12 additional votes per poll he says he needs to turn the tide? Or allow Doug Sparks to win a three-way race in Preston that was so close last time only 80 votes separated the riding’s first from third-place finisher? Or win in Queen’s where Vicki Conrad is running again to try and close the 421-vote gap between herself and Tory cabinet minister Kerry Morash? Or make the difference in Waverley-Fall River-Beaverbank where Percy Paris lost to Tory MLA Gary Hines in 2003 by just 363 votes. Darrell Dexter, in fact, very calculatedly launched his party’s election campaign in the Waverley riding and, by then end of the second week of the campaign, had visited the constituency two more times.
But even if the NDP does manage to add those four seats to its current 15 and perhaps pick up a few more without losing any they currently hold, will that push them over the edge to form a government?
It’s still unlikely, says Ian Stewart. “There are only a finite number of seats the NDP has any realistic hope of winning. Much of rural Nova Scotia is still a black hole for them.” Worse, if the Liberal vote does collapse, as many are expecting, Stewart says that might end up converting some of their red seats to Tory blue, making a majority Conservative government considerably more likely than a minority NDP one.
An NDP victory, concludes Setewart, “would be a long shot. It wouldn’t be as surprising as [the party’s breakthrough] in 1997 or ’98, but would I be surprised? Yes, I would.”
Darrell Dexter, who describes himself as “a political junkie who thoroughly enjoys the machinations and strategic thinking” that go into such discussions, knows all about those permutations and combinations and what ifs… which may be why he doesn’t want to talk about them.
What, I want to know, will constitute success for the NDP in this election?
“That’s a loaded question,” he replies. “No matter what I say, I’ll live to regret it. I’ve got too much to think about just campaigning to spend a whole lot of political capital thinking about what the end result is going to be in terms of numbers of seats. We’ll just keep trying to get our message out there and let the voters decide what happens.”
Darrell Dexter has to go now. There’s an orange ribbon still to cut, another constituency office in Windsor that needs opening in a half an hour from now, and too many more days and nights of campaigning to go before the voters render their decision.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.