There’s no need to overthink what happened in the just-concluded Nova Scotia general election.
Down in the polls by more than 20 points in July and facing an incumbent Liberal government seeking a third consecutive majority, all Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives did was run a great campaign, overcame their opponents’ lead — and triumph, winning the first PC majority since John Hamm did it in 1999.
Meanwhile, the incumbents, Iain Rankin and the Nova Scotia Liberals, did the opposite. They squandered their good fortune, ran a poor campaign, and paid the price. They’ll now sit in opposition for four years.
The lesson? Campaigns matter.
Campaigns need to start with focus. They must have a clear ballot question that voters can understand and then partisans have to execute, identifying their supporters and getting them to a ballot box.
The PCs did all those things. The focus and ballot question could not possibly be missed. Houston talked about health care. Then he talked about health care. And finally, he talked about health care. And with 70,000 Nova Scotians without a family doctor, voters were ready to listen and respond to Houston’s commitment to spend whatever it might take to keep clinics and emergency rooms open and mount an aggressive campaign in Canada and around the world to convince more medical professionals to live and work in Nova Scotia.
Gary Burrill and the Nova Scotia NDP were similarly clear with their message. With NDP support concentrated in Halifax, Burrill was the champion for those frustrated by the rising cost of living in the province’s largest urban area and vowed, time and time again, to advocate for rent control. Voters in the urban core rewarded the NDP by boosting the NDP seat count in the legislature. Houston, in his victory speech Tuesday night, acknowledged Burrill’s focus and would be smart to pay it some heed as he begins now to craft a speech from the throne.
By contrast, it was never clear what the Liberal campaign was all about beyond giving its new leader, Rankin, his own majority to succeed the pair won by the party’s previous leader, Stephen McNeil. Rankin had difficulty articulating any message. His campaign quarrelled with the media. And the Liberals completely failed to mobilize their own base.
Campaigning politicians anywhere — but particularly those now on the hustings in the 44th federal election — can look to the Nova Scotia race and then compare and contrast with their own campaign.
No federal campaign, so far at least, has the crystal-clear clarity of the Houston campaign, least of all the incumbent, Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals. Trudeau’s answer on Sunday when asked “why now?” about the snap federal election was, essentially, “why not now?” That may have been clever at the time but it is hardly the kind of theme that can power a winning campaign. Indeed, Trudeau’s pitches since them have largely been a variation of Rankin’s — he seems to want more power to do more of the same.
That said, the Trudeau government will certainly take note that Houston literally ran against the federal Conservative party led by Erin O’Toole. Most notably, Houston rejected all criticism that his proposals would run up the debt. Houston correctly surmised that voters were not interested in anything close to austerity while his opponent, Rankin, played the role of the fiscal conservative, arguing that Nova Scotia needed to set itself on a path to balanced budgets.
While O’Toole’s political roots are in the kind of Progressive Conservative party Houston has created, O’Toole turned himself into a “True Blue” Conservative to win his party’s leadership (beating Nova Scotian Peter MacKay in the process) and while he’s tried since to flash a little of that old “PC” brand since, he’s got influential candidates like incumbent Pierre Poilievre, a fiscal hardliner who has been loudly warning about debt and rising inflation for months. Nova Scotians, at least, didn’t care. And, in fact, both federal government polling, as well as data from public pollsters, show that debt and deficits rank low among voters’ concerns right now.
Finally, Houston was the first challenger to defeat an incumbent government during an election held in a pandemic. After incumbents won in B.C., Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, Houston’s accomplishment will give some comfort to Trudeau’s challengers. It can be done. That said, all five pandemic provincial elections have resulted in a majority government for the victor. Are voters in five provinces saying that they prefer the certainty and relative political calm that comes with majority governments? The Trudeau team certainly hopes so.
David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.