Liberals could win big in Atlantic Canada

Opinion

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This article was published 23/09/2015 (3664 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bill Casey may be the most important candidate running for federal office in Atlantic Canada. The former Conservative-turned-Liberal has received an inordinate amount of attention from the media and from national leaders campaigning on the East Coast.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau paid an early visit to the northern Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester, where the 70-year-old was a Tory MP for 15 years, and last week former prime minister Jean Chrétien dropped by to praise his one-time adversary. Casey’s former boss, Stephen Harper, has been to the riding twice this year and it was one of his first stops after calling the election.

Why the intense interest in a mostly rural riding that few Canadian could find on a map? With the Liberals poised to gain as many as a dozen seats in Atlantic Canada, Trudeau and Chrétien hope Casey will oust the Conservative incumbent, Scott Armstrong.

The prime minister’s interest, however, is as much personal as political. Harper has a score to settle with Casey, who defied him in 2007 and voted against a budget that reduced provincial revenues from offshore petroleum development. Casey was drummed out of the party but got even in 2008, winning as an independent before joining the Liberal fold.

There’s another reason for Harper’s fixation on Cumberland-Colchester — Tory prospects are so grim in Atlantic Canada that holding the riding would be a symbolic victory and one of the few bright spots in what’s shaping up to be an East Coast rout.

Last week the region’s leading polling firm, Corporate Research Associates, pegged the Conservatives as a distant third in the four Atlantic provinces, with the support of just 18 per cent of respondents. Harper is the least popular of the leaders of the three major parties, the choice of just 16 per cent of respondents. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is not far behind.

Trudeau is the front-runner — one out of three of the poll’s respondents want him to be prime minister and 45 per cent plan to vote Liberal or are leaning that way. Thomas Mulcair and the NDP have cut into the Liberal lead in recent months, but remain well back as the choice of one-third of respondents.

Harper went into the campaign with 13 of the region’s 32 seats. The poll aggregating website threehundredeight.com projects he may emerge on Oct. 20 with a few as three, all of them in New Brunswick. Trudeau’s Liberals, meanwhile, began the campaign with a dozen seats and could win 22, according to the site’s analysis. The NDP should take the remaining seven — a gain of a single seat.

Why is there so much daylight between the parties in the region when national polls consistently point to a tight three-way race? Atlantic Canada has become a regional power base for the Liberals, with three provinces electing or returning the party to government within the past two years. The fourth, Newfoundland and Labrador, appears certain to turf its unpopular Progressive Conservative administration in favour of the Liberals when a provincial vote is held in November.

Trudeau’s promises to spend on infrastructure and undo the Harper government’s changes to the employment insurance program — an underpinning of Atlantic Canada’s fishing, tourism and other seasonal industries — have played well in the region. His lukewarm support for the Energy East project (the proposed pipeline to bring Alberta oil and badly needed jobs to New Brunswick) may be the only thing keeping a few of that province’s ridings in the Harper camp.

The retirements of several incumbents, including regional power broker Peter MacKay, have been a further blow to the Tories. But the malaise goes deeper — Atlantic Canadians have never warmed to Harper and his rebranded Conservative party. All four provincial parties have retained the Progressive Conservative label to keep their distance, and Newfoundland and Labrador’s former PC premier Danny Williams openly campaigned against Harper in 2011.

This time around, “virtually every Conservative riding is in play,” notes Corporate Research Associates pollster Don Mills, including MacKay’s former riding of Central Nova, which has been in Tory hands for all but four of the past 48 years.

And in the neighbouring riding of Cumberland-Colchester, a poll released this week gave Bill Casey a comfortable lead over his Conservative rival. It looks like he’ll have the last laugh.

Dean Jobb is an associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and the author of Empire of Deception.