Do boots on the ground equal votes in the hand?
Time flies when you’re having fun. Ask Darrell Dexter. Next month, he will celebrate his second anniversary as the province’s first ever NDP premier. In two years—probably less—he will try to become Nova Scotia’s NDP premier to win a second majority government… or, perhaps, settle for a minority… or, failing one of the above—and politics being politics—not be Ignatieffed in his own riding.
His fate then may well depend on what happens in Ottawa today.
Today, Dexter leads a high-level, high-profile delegation of business and government leaders to Toryland. Their goal: to browbeat, sweet-talk, cajole Stephen Harper’s newly re-elected, no-reason-to-like-Nova-Scotia majority government into spreading some largesse our way.
The stakes are billions of dollars high.
Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding, for example, wants a sweet piece of the navy’s upcoming $35-billion shipbuilding program. At a “Ships Start Here” kick-off pep rally Friday, Dexter touted consultants’ reports claiming the project could generate 11,500 spin-off jobs and inject $800 million a year into the provincial economy.
“Winning this bid,” Dexter declared, “would equate to hosting the Olympics each year for 30 years.”
And then, of course, there’s the Lower Churchill, a $6.2-billion Newfoundland-Nova Scotia power generating and transmission project Dexter has grandly called “our Canadian Pacific Railway.” Dexter is fond of metaphor and simile.
If Lower Churchill happens—and Stephen Harper promised to make it happen during the federal campaign—Nova Scotia workers would be in line for a chunk of its 45,000 person-years worth of work. And the Lower Churchill itself would become a stable source of forever energy for Nova Scotians—and for future industrial development.
While Dexter will remind Ottawa of the prime minister’s Lower Churchill pledge, he’ll stickhandle more delicately past Harper’s seeming reluctance to cough up $47 million finance Halifax’s infamous downtown convention centre. Please!
And, among those many other supplications, Dexter will also pitch yet another provincial capital project: a new stadium.
If Dexter can convince Ottawa to fund any or all of the above, it will mean construction boots on the ground in time for the next provincial election.
Which could make Dexter’s hopes for re-election more likely.
Which, of course, is the idea.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
So really, why do we love this town?
The question, of course, is why?
According to the latest CityThink survey—conducted for Metro Halifax and the Greater Halifax Partnership—91 per cent of us are pleased as punch to live in our awkwardly named Halifax Regional Municipality. Forty-two per cent of us, in fact, are very smug about it.
Why?
Consider that this particular poll was conducted from April 13-23, deep in the trough of the never-ending annual rite of rain that is our spring, a stretch season that will drearily continue, with occasional one or two-day sunshine teases, until sometime in late July when our briefest of brief summers unofficially begins.
That can’t be the reason—to quote reporter Aly Thompson quoting songwriter Joel Plaskett—“I love this town.”
Nor can it be—please, no—the fact we keep electing vision-less Peter Kelly as mayor of us all, along with his barking dog’s breakfast of municipal councillors endlessly debating cat bylaws and memos on councilor decorum.
Keep in mind this city we love so dearly—and which an equal percentage of us see ourselves living just as happily in for the foreseeable future—spent $330 million-plus to build a harbour-solutions sewage solution that is only a solution when the sun shines. (See paragraph 4; see outside your window.)
This is also—remember—the city that recently secretly funneled millions of our tax dollars into the pockets of multi-millionaire entertainers because we wouldn’t spend our own non-tax dollars to buy tickets to watch them perform.
This is a city that can’t decide whether to build a new convention centre, a new stadium, both, or neither; have an historic downtown, a high-rise downtown, both, or neither… what it will be when it grows up.
So why do we—me included—love it so much?
Could it be that intoxicating—if occasionally fragrant and floatable-filled—co-mingling of salt water and sea air?
Our accidental-but-it-works, muddled mess of old and new, art and commerce, busy and bucolic?
Or perhaps, to steal another random line from the same Joel Plaskett song: “it’s not what you think”?
Perhaps it’s Joel Plaskett?
Sure. Why not? There’s got to be a rational reason that I love this town.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Is this any way to run a country?
One last—I promise—look back in befuddlement to the results of last week’s federal election.
If we are to believe the pundits—and who are we not to—Canada has just gone through a dramatic, head-shaking, concussion-making electoral re-alignment in which our national consensus has become far more conservative and the political centre has disappeared, leaving us with only a bi-polar, left-right, take-it-or-leave-it choice.
In the process, the Conservatives have become our new Natural Governing Party (NGP), the Liberals and Bloc are wiped out and the NDP is in the process of making itself over as a kind of leftish Permanent Opposition (POed).
And yet…
And yet, if we are to believe a couple of young Facebook buds with calculators, the real difference between all of the above and almost none of the above is actually 6,201 votes out of the 14.7 million cast last Monday.
If 6,201 voters in the 14 most closely contested Conservative ridings in the country—none in Atlantic Canada; don’t blame us—had voted a different way, Stephen Harper’s unassailable majority would be yet another minority government.
“When one becomes aware of how easy it is for the intentions of the voters to become distorted,” notes Matt Peters, who did the “’rithmatic,” “it is hard not to conclude that some kind of electoral reform is needed.”
Indeed.
If Peters’ what-if history had happened, we would now be speculating—given that two million more Canadians voted against Harper than voted for him—on whether the man the pundits have seemingly anointed prime minister for life actually had a political future at all.
Or… what if the Liberals had received the number of seats their percentage of the popular vote merited. They would have 58 MPs instead of 34, still nowhere near the 77 they started with, but more representative of their current level of voter support…
Representative of their level of voter support… What a concept!
Is there a rational reason why we’re one of only four countries in the industrialized world that still employs an electoral system that allows a party chosen by a minority of voters to govern like they have just won the winner-take-all sweepstakes?
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Election 2011: a strange sweet trip that may not be over
What a short, strange, sweet trip it’s been—made all the sweeter because not a single politician, party insider, pollster, pundit or person predicted it. Including me. My first post-election-call column was a lament that—in a campaign focused so tightly on just 50 swing ridings—the votes of the rest of us wouldn’t count.
Uh, right…
What happened? The short answer is Canadians took back their politics—on social media, in vote mobs, in their own minds. They rose up—though not the way Michael Ignatieff hoped—and told pollsters they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.
“It” was Stephen Harper and his smarmy, controlling politics of fear and loathing of any other. But it was also the Bloc Quebecois and the Gilles-one-note clanking call to non. And Michael Ignatieff, who ran a mostly solid campaign but couldn’t escape his pre-election Tory tarring as the outsider-other, or the reality his so-recently-discredited Liberals represented a tired alternative that wasn’t.
This negative, none-of-the-above frustration almost certainly fed the tsnunami that has swept the NDP from its nadir of 13.2 per cent in polls two weeks into the campaign to the giddying heights of official opposition, perhaps even minority government territory today.
But if the NDP surge is, in part, a negative response, it is also—in perhaps larger part—a reflection of voters’ hope for better.
Jack Layton isn’t new, and neither is the NDP platform.
But after 4.6 million of us watched his performance in the leaders’ debate, the ground under this election began to shift seismically.
Why?
The NDP engaged Canadians in discussions about their issues, and the avuncular, unflappable Layton steered clear of the personal negatives—our attack ads, he joked, are about attacking poverty—that were other parties’ staples.
The NDP’s sudden surge, of course, means its platform—and how it gets paid for—hasn’t been scrutinized nearly carefully enough (although the Globe Friday trotted out 10 bank and business economists who concluded “no one appears to be shaking” at the prospect of an NDP government).
However it all turns out, Canadians have already shaken conventional political assumptions. That is reason enough to hope.
But stay tuned. This trip may not be over yet.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.