Well, the general election for Nova Scotia went through today. It was one of those ideal days to decide the political fate of an area - dull, cold, and rainy, with driving winds that occaisionally kicked up enough to make the rain hurt. Wonderful day to me, aside from that whole election thing. In any case, it was a chance to give the Tories a few kicks to the solar plexus and other sensitive places, which I gleefully took.
There've been a lot of interesting things going on this election, though. In no particular order:
As for the outcome of the election itself.. Well, the Tories maintained power. Sorta. Barely. All told, the Tories got 25 seats, the NDP 15, and the Liberals 12; the fringe parties got nothing this time around. Now, you may notice that 25 and 15 and 12 is 52, but 25 is less than half of 52, which means the Tories have been hamstrung with some effectiveness. The popular vote was almost a perfect split - 36.33%, 31.01%, and 31.44% respectively, with the remainder going to the Everyone Else parties.
Two parties lost out in this election, but the odd thing is that the Tories were one of them. They went into this election with a comfortable majority of some thirty seats, well above the 27 needed for a proper majority government as far as such things go. By 9:45pm this evening they had five seats shot out from under them. As if putting them into the minority wasn't bad enough, three of the Tory cabinet ministers - Health Minister Jane Purves, Natural Resources Minister Tim Olive, and Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Gordon Balser lost to the Liberals, NDP, and Liberals, respectively. Purves was almost certain to go - her mismanagement of education and health during her tenures of each portfolio have become something of a provincial legend, and her presence in the main university district at Halifax Citadel guaranteed the ire of the under-thirty crowd against whom the Tories tend to so often be actively opposed. The other two ministers are simply additional kicks on a downed party, leaving the Tories with an extremely limited pool from which to select their cabinet.
The Liberals... well, they're still around. They didn't do very well, neither gaining nor losing anything significant (although Graham did demolish Purves in Citadel, winning after a neck-and-neck race with the NDP), which is a hell of a lot less than they hoped for. Traditionally, the Nova Scotia government bounces back and forth between the Liberals and Tories, but the Liberals are still riding the crest of defeat from the nineties, and are probably going to remain impotent in the province for several mandates to come.
The NDP, on the other hand, came out of nowhere, painted Halifax/Dartmouth orange, and are acting as though they won the election. For all intents and purposes, they may have. They pulled several seats out from under both parties, including major landslides in some ridings - seventy percent of the vote in a six-party race in places!
This leaves the NDP as a very large opposition to a very small government, which pretty much means the Tories aren't likely to get a hell of a lot done. Many of the big Tory plans from the previous mandate involved massive cuts to health and education - two of the NDP's larger interests - in addition to some blatant favoritism, such as the education scandal near the election when they opted to punish non-Tory districts by eliminating all education funding. Between the NDP and the Liberals, the Tories have twenty-seven MLAs quite prepared to do anything from defeating minor proposals to bringing down the entire government should the premier get too out of line.
So what do I have to say about the long term here? There probably won't be too much in the lines of major changes. In the post-election afterglow the Tories will have to enact stuff they don't wish to enact just to survive some of the promises they made at the start of the campaign, and they don't need any more damage considering how effectively the NDP has been looking over their shoulder. Granted, it's probably going to suck to be a college student or teacher for the next several years, but the Liberals and NDP have both made public their intent to set the Tories straight on those issues. The next few years might see the government spending as much time doing as the opposition wishes as it spends being the government proper. The Tory mandate is going to be under a perpetual threat, as it will only take one money bill's defeat, or one lost confidence vote in general, to bring down the government and force a new election.
I don't see the government lasting another four years. Two seems optimistic. Hamm was right, though; it's going to be an interesting mandate...
* - The riding in question was eventually decided by an octuple-handful of forty-someodd votes out of the approximately 4200 cast. These forty-one single votes made the difference between a base majority and a minority government.
Posted by zibblsnrt at August 5, 2003 08:29 PM