Nova Scotia offers lesson to Liberals

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/08/2021 (1483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nova Scotians headed to the polls in a provincial election this past Tuesday. The incumbent premier, Liberal Iain Rankin, had triggered the election in July, roughly a month after having been selected as party leader. The goal had been for the new premier to acquire a fresh mandate from voters, but also to transform his minority Liberal government into a majority, which would be much easier to manage.

Everyone expected Rankin to do so, given favourable polls at the outset of the campaign. Nevertheless, a poorly executed front-runner strategy from Rankin and a focused, impressive campaign from his Conservative competitor, Tim Houston, produced a surprise result that defied the polls: a Conservative majority that no one — probably not even Houston’s mom — was sincerely predicting at the outset of the campaign.

Since this provincial result coincides with the current Canadian federal election campaign, the question it raises for non-Nova Scotians is whether it portends anything for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s re-election chances.

There are several parallels between Trudeau and Rankin that must, to the Liberals, be at least somewhat disconcerting. Rankin hoped to sail to re-election on the basis of respectable ratings of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And he started the election campaign far ahead in the polls, hoping to transform his minority into a majority.

All this applies to Trudeau as well. Most importantly, the prime minister’s decision to trigger an election was widely seen as an opportunistic gambit designed to take advantage of high public approval in order to clinch a majority government.

That decision already appears to be backfiring. On the eve of the issuing of the writs, pollster Nic Nanos reported the Liberals were suffering from a “recoil effect” related to the election call, and their support was dropping as a result. “This hot speculation about an election has shifted voters from the Liberal column to the Conservative column, probably because they are upset about the fact that there is an election,” Nanos argues.

Polling trackers now show that while Trudeau is still ahead of his competitors, the Liberals are quickly shedding the support necessary to upgrade to a majority government. Even if he is re-elected, winning another minority government in this election will feel like egg on the prime minister’s face.

This hasn’t been helped by the prime minister’s thus-far lacklustre performance on the campaign trail. When aggressively questioned over why he was calling the election, Trudeau stumbled. It was obvious ahead of time journalists would pepper Trudeau with these questions; rather than giving a clear and compelling reason for why he is dragging Canadians to the polls, the prime minister provided only weak sauce.

Later on in the week, Trudeau was asked to comment about the renewal of the Bank of Canada’s inflation mandate if he is re-elected. This is a major issue, given that cost of living and affordability are likely to be important issues during the campaign. But Trudeau whiffed, dismissing the question: “You’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy.”

This careless answer will surely find its way into a Tory attack ad.

Prior to the election, Conservative Party Leader Erin O’Toole suffered from low approval ratings and, as a result, was dismissed by most opinion-makers. The new Tory leader has struggled to define himself with voters, and his support has only inched upwards as Trudeau’s has fallen. O’Toole’s lack of popularity was reportedly a major reason for this election call: Trudeau and his strategists thought it best to strike while the iron was hot.

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But, like Houston, O’Toole should not be underestimated. He has broken from his predecessors with new policy ideas. And O’Toole has been at pains to build relationships with Canadians who are not natural Tory voters, including union members and young people concerned about affordability and the vanishing prospects of ever owning a home.

The Tories released their full policy platform in the first few days of the campaign. Normally, this is strategically ill-advised, since it gives the other parties a target to shoot at. But O’Toole appears willing to take risks and swing for the fences.

There is also the possibility that the Nova Scotia election tells us virtually nothing about the federal election and what its outcome will be. The province only has 11 federal seats, all but one of which favoured Liberal MPs in the last election. It’s possible that Conservative candidates will ride on a wave of goodwill for Houston and his new provincial government and that Nova Scotia will elect more seats for O’Toole in this campaign.

But even if there ends up being no parallel between these provincial and federal elections, it is still one of several bad headlines for Trudeau’s Liberals in the early days of this campaign.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.