Since 1970, four Nova Scotia governments have delayed elections into the fifth year of their mandates. Three of the four got clobbered. In 1978, Gerald Regan's Liberals went almost seven months into their fifth year, then dropped from 31 seats to 17. In 1993, Donald Cameron's Progressive Conservatives went almost eight months into their fifth year, and fell from 28 seats to 9. Almost five years later, Russell MacLellan led the Liberals from a commanding 40 seats to a humiliating 19-seat tie with the New Democrats, allowing him to govern only briefly with the slenderest of minorities. In 2003, John Hamm went just 10...

04 August, 2013

On CBC Radio last week, Contrarian’s old friend Ralph Surette said Nova Scotia Liberals had dumped their last nine leaders — every one since Gerald Regan — before they could fight a second election. That’s not quite true. The Liberals have had only seven leaders since Regan, and two of those took the party through two elections. Still, the record is fratricidal: The operative question is whether the Liberals will repeat this pattern when they review leader Stephen McNeil's leadership Friday. A covert campaign to unseat McNeil has featured an inept website and a mass mail-out using a purloined copy of the...

08 May, 2010

The June 9 general election saw a new party take power in Nova Scotia. It bears comment that, to the best of Contrarian's knowledge, not a single highway worker lost his job as a result, and this non-massacre occurred without notice. On September 20, 1978, the day after John Buchanan defeated Gerald Regan, many highway workers didn't bother to show up for work. It went without saying that Tory sympathizers would take over their jobs. The next time government changed hands, in 1993, Liberal hacks were so infuriated at John Savage's refusal to cleanse highway garages of Tory hires, they eventually hounded...

25 October, 2009