6.
Inside the Dexter Government
The Cabinet, more formally referred to as the executive council, is the supreme decision-making body of government — in theory. The Cabinet meets once a week, on a Thursday morning, in a windowless room on the ground floor of One Government Place, diagonally opposite the back door of Province House. The multi-purpose room, as it is known, has no soul. It could be a hotel meeting room anywhere in North America.
The room is dominated by a large, black table. The table was too large for a twelve-member Cabinet and too wide for a comfortable conversation. The premier sits at the head, and the ministers sit in order of precedence. The deputy premier sits on the premier’s left. After that, precedence is determined by years in Cabinet, years in the House, and where there’s a tie, by the alphabetical names of constituencies. So to Darrell’s left was Frank Corbett, John MacDonell, me, Sterling Belliveau, Denise Peterson-Rafuse, and Ross Landry. To Darrell’s right was Maureen MacDonald, Bill Estabrooks, Marilyn More, Percy Paris, and Ramona Jennex.
How do you learn to be a Cabinet minister?
The Cabinet agenda and supporting material is circulated a week in advance — in theory. A surprising amount of the agenda is routine business, such as small land transactions and appointment of commissioners of oaths. The agenda can be very short or very long, and the supporting material can be a few pages or inches thick. I’m a fast reader, but still I struggled to keep up with the Cabinet material. We were all busy with our departments, our constituencies, and our families. Reading the Cabinet material always got pushed to the edges of my calendar — early mornings and late nights.
The provincial government is a sprawling behemoth. On one agenda you might find new workplace safety regulations, a health authority business plan, a federal-provincial agreement on correctional services, and a provincial bond issue. The next week it might be a revision to a funding agreement with a medical specialty, a payroll rebate agreement from Nova Scotia Business Inc., changes to the social assistance regulations, and a beef support program. And the week after is different again.
Do we seriously expect our Cabinet ministers to have meaningful discussions on such a bewildering array of topics?
I’ve already pointed out that our MLAs are almost comically unsuited for the role that is thrust upon them in the legislature. That is doubly true of the MLAs we put in Cabinet. Every Cabinet is chosen based on a mix of ability, seniority, gender, ethnicity, and geography, and ours was no exception. One day you’re a regular citizen, with maybe a few years of experience in the legislature, or maybe none. The next day you’re a Cabinet minister, and suddenly you’re supposed to read, digest, and debate all manner of complex issues, week after week, when each of the topics would be a challenge for any expert in the field.
The Dexter Cabinet started with only twelve members. The point, I think, was to demonstrate more frugality than the MacDonald Cabinet, which at the end had ballooned to nineteen. John Hamm had done the same thing, starting with an eleven-member Cabinet as a way to contrast himself with the outgoing Liberals. But Cabinet size is the wrong way to send a signal. In exchange for a signal that is quickly forgotten, we had only a dozen people, none of whom had ever served as a minister, in charge of a provincial government with a finger in a thousand pies and a budget of over nine billion dollars.
To make it even harder, or more comical, deputy ministers aren’t allowed to see Cabinet documents from other departments, so they can’t help their ministers prepare. The finance deputy was the only exception. I suppose it had occurred to someone in the past that the Department of Finance, at least, should be aware of what Cabinet was looking at so they could spot any financial implications. The rest of the ministers come into Cabinet without a briefing on how the proposals might impact their own department, never mind anyone else’s. When I went to Economic and Rural Development and Tourism (erdt), in May 2013, I started showing the Cabinet agenda to my deputy. It was the first time he’d ever seen one.
On top of all this, there are “walk-ins.” A walk-in is when the premier or a minister is looking for a decision, but the material hasn’t been circulated in advance. Sometimes a matter is so urgent that advance notice isn’t possible. Usually, though, it’s poor planning by a department or indifference by a minister. The premier would also use walk-ins when he considered a decision to be his prerogative, like the appointment of a deputy minister.
Walk-ins are dangerous because, by definition, nobody has had time to read the material, much less to think about it. We had been warned, quietly, that most of the previous government’s controversial files could be traced back to Cabinet walk-ins. I thought walk-ins were a terrible way to do business and pressed hard to eliminate them except in cases of true urgency. We never eliminated them completely. In a bit of poetic justice, one of my last Cabinet items was a walk-in. My colleagues, who had for years listened to my lectures against walk-ins, noted the irony.
Beyond the formal business, a Cabinet meeting can be whatever the premier wants it to be. I have read about other governments in which Cabinet meetings would go on for hours, maybe all day. Darrell did not use his Cabinet this way. There were no free-wheeling policy debates and no lengthy political discussions. Everyone had somewhere else they needed to be. The only concession was that the first half hour was kept open for whatever anyone wanted to bring up. Apart from that, we did the formal business on the agenda, did the post-Cabinet media scrums, and then we left, back to our departments and our constituencies.
The Power of the Premier
The concept of “premier” or “first minister” is hardly acknowledged in the Canadian constitution or the laws of Nova Scotia. Virtually all formal legal authority for the executive governance of the province rests with the Cabinet or a minister.
Yet it is the premier, not the Cabinet, who wields the real power in our modern system of government. The premier is far more than “first among equals,” which is what I was taught thirty years ago in my undergraduate course on Canadian government. The premier may not be a monarch or a president, but we’re not far off.
Why is our premier so powerful? He’s powerful because we let him be powerful. And we let him be powerful because of politics.
The premier is powerful mostly because modern elections are focused on the person and personality of the party leader. Since the premier is, by definition, the leader of the party that won the most seats, the premier comes out of the election with a great deal of political authority — and political authority leads to deference. That certainly happened with Darrell, though it seems to happen with any leader who wins a majority: John Savage in 1993, John Hamm in 1999, Stephen McNeil in 2013.
The NDP’s biggest asset in the 2009 election was Darrell Dexter. His name carried us all to victory. He knew it, and we knew it. The downside was that we couldn’t adjust when his popularity starting falling. By the 2013 election campaign, people on the doorstep in Halifax Fairview would spit at the sound of his name.
The premier is powerful also because he decides who is in Cabinet. He has the sole power of appointment, assignment, and dismissal. The premier doesn’t even need to say anything. The desire to be in Cabinet exerts an almost otherworldly pull on a politician’s mind. A Cabinet post carries more pay and higher prestige. It’s where the action is — or so everybody thinks. Every backbencher knows that any misbehaviour, real or imagined, can scotch his or her chance at a Cabinet post.
As it turned out, Darrell never dropped anyone from Cabinet, probably because he feared that it would harm the re-election prospects of whoever was moved out. This was a mistake. Not only did it block the ambitions of the backbenchers — who are motivated by the hope, however slender, of one day being in Cabinet — but it protected ministers by shielding them from any consequences for under-performance. There were a few changes over the years — the Cabinet expanded when Dave Wilson and Charlie Parker were added in 2011, then Maurice Smith and Leonard Preyra replaced me and Bill Estabrooks when Bill and I resigned in 2012, then I replaced Percy Paris when Percy resigned in 2013 — but the Cabinet that went down to defeat in 2013 was mostly the same people who were appointed in 2009.
The premier is also powerful because he is the only person in the government who also holds an elected, province-wide party office. He is the leader of the government because he is the leader of the party. As leader he controls the party apparatus: the polling, the organization, the fundraising. Running a modern political party, with its perpetual campaigns and reliance on big-data technology and marketing, requires large amounts of money. Whoever controls the money controls the election apparatus, and whoever controls the election apparatus controls the politicians. And it’s the leader, usually, who controls the money.
The last piece of the premier’s political control — and in fact of any party leader, not just the premier — is his power under the Elections Act to decide who carries the party banner in the next election. I am aware of at least one case in which Darrell told a would-be candidate that he would refuse to sign the election papers, even if the would-be candidate won the constituency nomination vote. Whether it’s used or not, this power is the equivalent of political capital punishment. Since the drive to re-election is an MLA’s primary motivation, the threat of being denied the party’s nomination is enough to keep them in line. It doesn’t have to be said out loud. It’s just there.
Darrell as Premier
How do you learn to be a premier?
I heard Darrell say that being premier is a lonely job.
For Darrell, there was no previous NDP premier to turn to. Former premiers from other parties are willing to chat, but only on strictly limited topics and certainly not on anything partisan. There are current and former NDP premiers from other provinces — former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney, for example, was a particular help because he was a Nova Scotia native and was frequently at his summer place on the South Shore — but care must be taken with advice coming from a different time and place.
It was not Darrell’s style to have much interaction with his ministers. People might assume that a premier and his finance minister would talk regularly, but we didn’t. Over all my time in Cabinet, I had maybe six one-on-one meetings with him, almost all at my request. I rarely saw Darrell outside of Cabinet and caucus meetings.
I suppose, in a way, I could take that as a compliment. Darrell left me alone. He told me once that there were only two ministers who didn’t need regular care and feeding, and I was one of them. He and I openly disagreed only rarely — like when I proposed a gambling strategy that was relatively tough on video lottery terminals, and his response was first to reject it and later to take the portfolio away from me. We were mostly on the same page, but surely we could have stood to have more interaction.
I will say this: Darrell was always thoroughly prepared for Cabinet meetings. He always had a firm grasp of all the material, every week. I admired this capacity of Darrell’s. I wondered where he found the time.
I also worried that he mistook his ability to grasp the details of many issues for a requirement that he get personally involved in anything that caught his attention. I learned not to discuss anything within his earshot, because inevitably he would want to know what was being talked about, and then he would say what he thought should be done, even though there had been time to give him only a snippet of the background. He dove far into some issues, like the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, that consumed his attention and energy and in which he became emotionally invested. He should have left those issues to the people around him.
The People Around Darrell
There were four men who played key roles in the Premier’s Office. All roads in government led to one or another of them. One or more of them attended every Cabinet meeting and every Cabinet committee meeting. If they weren’t there, the meeting usually didn’t start until they were. They sat at a table off to the side, not at the Cabinet table itself, but they participated fully in discussions and we often turned to them for comment or advice.
Dan O’Connor, chief of staff. Dan had by far the most political experience of any of us. He had played a high-level role in the government of Howard Pawley in Manitoba. Later he was a key adviser to Alexa McDonough, then Robert Chisholm, then Darrell. He is a lovely, decent, eccentric man. He could amaze with his wisdom and baffle with his incoherence. He is not a good manager of people — there was almost a caucus staff revolt after the 1999 election — but as the premier’s chief of staff he was in charge of all the people around Darrell. Everything that mattered in government went through Dan. Probably Dan should have been locked in a room and tasked solely with strategizing. That was his forte. After the devastating defeat of 2013, he retired.
Shawn Fuller, director of communications. Shawn grew up in the Avonport area of the Annapolis Valley and started work as a small-town newspaper reporter. This background, along with a big dose of farm charm, carried him a long way: he brought a talent for dogged research, strong writing, and a keen sense of what matters to regular folks. He’d been in the campaign van with Robert Chisholm in the 1998 election when the NDP was a very small operation. Apart from some time at the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union (nsgeu), he’d been with the NDP ever since. In addition to leading Darrell’s communications, Shawn took on a significant role in labour relations on behalf of the government. He was a key player in the events that led to my resignation as finance minister in 2012. I’m sorry to say that, except for pleasantries, we rarely spoke after I resigned. After the 2013 election debacle, Shawn returned to the NSGEU.
Matt Hebb, principal secretary. When I arrived at the NDP caucus office in July 1998, Matt was a researcher. Like Shawn, he worked his way up and took some time out from the NDP to work for the NSGEU. Matt became the party’s polling guru. He was given a lot of the credit in NDP circles for the 2009 election victory, and his advice was sought by the national party under Jack Layton. As principal secretary, Matt was Darrell’s top political operative, the one who knits together governing and electoral strategy. To the surprise of many, he left the Premier’s Office in early 2013, within months of an expected election, to work for the president of Dalhousie University.
Paul Black, director of community relations. If Paul’s title seems vague, that was deliberate. His job was to do whatever needed to be done. Wherever there was a political fire, Paul was sent to fight it. In an organization as large as a provincial government, there are lots of fires, and some of them are infernos. The responsibility would have crushed someone less capable, but not Paul. He is smart and tough. He is also laconic and at times has a short fuse. He and I clashed, maybe because we’re too much alike, and there were times we could hardly stand to be in the same room. At other times, like when we were closing the deal with the Irving shipyard in the summer of 2013, there was nobody else I wanted to work with. When Matt Hebb left the Premier’s Office in early 2013 for the job at Dalhousie, Paul replaced him as principal secretary.
Executive Assistants
Every minister gets one, or occasionally two, political assistants. These executive assistants (EAs) have no job description, other than to assist the minister any way they can. Their prime directive is to keep the minister out of trouble.
I was fortunate to have very capable EAs. The first, Stephan Richard, was a former Radio-Canada journalist. He is smart, personable, and funny. I often joked that he should have been the politician, since he charmed people effortlessly, something I could never do. Within a year, the Premier’s Office saw how good he was, lured him away, and then promptly wasted his talent by burying him in the political bureaucracy. He emerged a couple of years later as an EA to my Cabinet colleague Denise Peterson-Rafuse.
Josh Bates came after Stephan. Raised mostly in Moncton but with parents in Halifax, Josh was looking to come home after five years working for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in Ottawa. He hadn’t been following Nova Scotia politics, but he’s sharp and learned fast. His FCM contacts meant he knew more Nova Scotia municipal leaders than I did, and they trusted him. Josh eventually left to work for HRM Mayor Mike Savage, with whom he had worked as a parliamentary intern.
Josh told me once that the biggest surprise, when he returned to Nova Scotia to take the job as my EA, was that Nova Scotia cabinet ministers were working with virtually no political staff. Even with people like Stephan and Josh at my side, it was never enough. It was the two of us against the opposition, against the lobbyists, against the bureaucracy. But when it came to the Premier’s Office, I was on my own. The ministers’ EAs were hired by the Premier’s Office, and the Premier’s Office made clear to them that their first loyalty was to the premier, not the minister with whom they spent so much time.
Deputy Ministers
Deputy ministers (DMs) are the administrative heads of the departments. They are the chief conduit between the minister and the department.
The DMs are appointed by Cabinet, but in practice, their selection is the sole prerogative of the premier. Darrell would present a memo to Cabinet, usually as a walk-in, with the names of his nominees. Cabinet would approve it, usually without discussion. I don’t know what process Darrell went through to select his nominees. After Vicki Harnish retired as deputy minister of the Department of Finance, I was asked if I knew Margaret MacDonald, the leading candidate to replace Vicki, and whether I could work with her. That was the extent of the consultation. Another time I told Darrell that I had serious concerns about the competence of one of his nominees, but at that point, when it was in front of Cabinet for rubber-stamping, it was too late for him to pull back. He shrugged and carried on.
Darrell decided, at the start of our mandate, not to engage in a wholesale change of deputy ministers. There is always pressure, especially inside the party, to “clean house” and appoint deputies who will be sympathetic to the new government’s agenda. Darrell resisted those calls. He didn’t want to start by antagonizing the civil service. After all, a government needs to have the support of the civil service to implement its program. We were trying to avoid a mistake made by the Savage government, whose dismissal of deputies started them off badly.
Darrell took a different approach. There were no immediate changes. Over time, though, one by one, there was almost a complete turnover of the deputies. Some of the new appointments were outstanding. Some were disappointments. It’s always going to be tough running a sprawling behemoth like the Nova Scotia government. If the Dexter government was going to have any chance at all, one of the starting points had to be a uniform level of excellence at the deputy level. There were always underperformers.
The Premier’s Office at Work
I wish I could explain how the Premier’s Office worked, but I can’t. Its workings are almost as much a mystery to me as they are to the general public. I was the finance minister and I was on all the Cabinet committees, but I never considered myself to be an insider. I supported Darrell, but we were not close. I could catch only glimpses of what was going on inside the Premier’s Office.
The real insiders were Dan, Shawn, Matt, and Paul. Darrell also spent a lot of time with the deputy minister to the premier — first Bob Fowler and then David Darrow — and with Rick Williams, the deputy minister of priorities and planning. Within the caucus and Cabinet, the only insiders were Frank Corbett and anyone who played golf with Darrell. I don’t play golf.
There has to be a Premier’s Office, because only a Premier’s Office has an overview of the whole government and only a Premier’s Office can take on complex and cross-cutting files like the pulp mill closures and the shipbuilding contract. There has to be a Premier’s Office, but unfortunately the Premier’s Office under Darrell Dexter gave us the worst of all worlds: a Premier’s Office that tried to exercise central control but lacked the resources to do it properly.
The office’s Achilles heel was the level of staffing. Through the opposition years, the NDP had often complained about the number of staff in the Premier’s Office. Having now been in government, I know it’s a superficial thing to criticize, but it would usually get us some media play so we went after it. When we became the government ourselves, we bought into the storyline and tried to demonstrate that our Premier’s Office was smaller than the previous government’s. The predictable result was that Premier’s Office staffers were overwhelmed with work.
To make things worse, the Premier’s Office staffers didn’t trust the competence or political smarts of all ministers some of the time and some ministers all of the time. Sometimes the staffers were right to be dubious. After all, our system of government requires the premier to build a Cabinet from whatever lumber the voters send to him, and the lumber isn’t always of the very highest quality. But sometimes the Premier’s Office staff were wrong to distrust a minister, and they got involved when it wasn’t needed and made things worse instead of better.
Once the Premier’s Office got involved in something, the lobbyists and interest groups wouldn’t want to deal with anyone else. Some ministers were left being marginal players in their own portfolios. Sure, they were busy, but often just with the administrivia of running a department, like signing requests for out-of-province travel, authorizing budgeted expenditures, and reviewing correspondence. On any issue that was really important, the Premier’s Office would be the decision-maker.
When people are overworked, they take shortcuts. For example, Premier’s Office staffers didn’t always let ministers know what they were doing. There was only twice during my time in government that I totally blew my stack, and one of them was over Paul involving himself on a sensitive file without telling me. (The other was over the actions of a civil servant who is no longer with the government. For legal reasons, I don’t think I can tell that story.) I don’t even remember now what it was. I had frequently told Dan that the Premier’s Office needed to keep me in the loop when they were working on issues within my portfolio. I wasn’t asking for much — just being copied on email would have been enough — but they kept sidestepping me, or forgetting. It happened once too often, and I yelled at Dan over the phone that I was still the finance minister, and if Paul Black wanted to be the finance minister, he could g — d — well run for office and get himself elected first.
It wasn’t just Premier’s Office staff who would cut me out of the loop. Civil servants did it too. They were absurdly deferential to any contact from the Premier’s Office. I don’t know whether it’s because of gratitude that their existence has been acknowledged, a desire to please, or a fear of punishment. I first tried to explain, and then had to insist, that they needed to stop thinking of the Premier’s Office as infallible and monolithic. The Premier’s Office was made up of flesh-and-blood individuals, with different levels of knowledge and authority. A call from someone in the Premier’s Office should be the beginning of a discussion, not the end, and they should certainly include me in the conversation.
The Premier’s Office staff enjoyed the deference they were shown. They would claim to speak in the name of the premier, but they wouldn’t always have the premier’s blessing. A few times, when my staff was following a questionable directive from someone in the Premier’s Office, I would buttonhole Darrell and say, “This is what your staff say you want; is that really what you want?” and as often as not, Darrell would say he had no idea what I was talking about, and no, that’s not what he wanted. There was one time that Dan and Paul gave me directly contradictory advice, both purporting to speak for Darrell, and I had to point out to them that they couldn’t both be right.
The focus on the Premier’s Office, and on the premier himself, means that nothing important gets done without the premier’s blessing. But the premier is only one person, and he has only so much time. The Premier’s Office jealously guards the gatekeeper function. The result is that even ministers don’t get many chances to brief the premier. They have to rely on the premier’s staff. Like the children’s game of telephone, I could never be sure what Darrell was really being told or what he was really saying back.
One time, near the end when I was at ERDT, I was trying to get Darrell’s go-ahead to take legal action against Eastlink. They had the contract for rural broadband in the southern half of the province, and after years of trying they still had hundreds, maybe thousands, of unserved customers. Our MLA constituency offices ended up as, in effect, the complaints department for Eastlink. I, too, as minister, was getting a regular stream of phone calls and emails from unhappy people who wanted Eastlink service but couldn’t get it.
I wanted to take a tougher stand with Eastlink so we could prove to those unserved people that we were on their side, and I wanted to do it before the election call. I explored the options with my staff, then got the Department of Justice to draft a toughly-worded letter to start the process. Our caucus members in the Eastlink service area were enthusiastic, but I could not get the green light from Darrell.
In fact I couldn’t get any answer at all.
In the end, Dan raised the issue with Darrell at a premiers’ conference in Niagara-on-the-Lake toward the end of July. So a complicated policy issue with financial consequences in the millions of dollars and touching on the homes of thousands of Nova Scotians was reduced to what was probably a thirty-second hallway conversation. The answer that came back to me was “No.” I don’t know what Dan told Darrell, and I don’t know what Darrell’s reasoning was. I never did get to sit down with Darrell before the election was called. We ended up doing nothing.
When Frank Corbett was asked in a newspaper interview what he was most proud of in his first few years in government, he replied that it was his work on Treasury Board. I wasn’t surprised, but that’s because I know what Treasury Board does. But to everyone else, it must have seemed an odd choice as a personal highlight.
After the Premier’s Office, the Treasury Board is the single most powerful part of the government. The Treasury Board is a committee of Cabinet with five members. Anything that involves spending — in other words, pretty much everything that matters — had to go through the Treasury Board. And yet Treasury Board is one of government’s great mysteries, almost completely unknown outside the upper echelons of government.
Sometimes, for fun, I would ask civil servants if they could name the five Treasury Board ministers. They couldn’t. I would ask journalists. They couldn’t. Even opposition MLAs who had been in the House a long time were fuzzy about what the Treasury Board did and who was on it.
The Treasury Board members, when we started, were Frank Corbett as chair, me, Bill Estabrooks, Ramona Jennex, and Percy Paris.
Treasury Board consumes a lot of the members’ time. It met every Tuesday morning and more often in the months before a budget. The meetings were held in the Cabinet room. (Sometimes I wonder whether the life wasn’t sucked right out of us by the amount of time we spent in that room.)
The table was too large, even for the Cabinet, but could not be rearranged to accommodate a smaller meeting like the Treasury Board. It meant that the members, and the presenters, were sitting far apart. The five ministers would sit at one end, and whoever was presenting would sit way down at the other end. I’ve heard that civil servants referred to Treasury Board as “the dragons’ den,” after the popular CBC show.
Treasury Board is where many of the most significant decisions are made within government. The Cabinet approves Treasury Board decisions by approving the minutes. Cabinet doesn’t have the time, or the desire, to go back over the same ground that the Treasury Board has covered. Once something has Treasury Board approval, it has the approval of five Cabinet ministers, including the deputy premier and the finance minister, and it has the implicit approval of the premier, since his senior staffers attend every Treasury Board meeting and contribute to the discussion. The chances of the Cabinet reversing a Treasury Board decision are zero.
Many of the key decisions that were controversial, and were seized upon by the opposition, were made by the Treasury Board — for example, the decision to cut the provincial subsidy for the Yarmouth ferry, which resulted immediately in Bay Ferries ending the service and selling the ship; the decision to buy and operate a mobile asphalt plant in an attempt to drive down road-building prices; and the decision to reduce the education budget to reflect the steady drop in the number of students. The only time the Treasury Board acted as a rubber stamp was on the big files — the salvaging of what we could from the closure of the pulp mills in Point Tupper and Liverpool, the provincial contribution to the massive shipbuilding contract won by Irving Shipbuilding, and the building of the Maritime Link electricity transmission line from Newfoundland to Cape Breton — because those files were being managed out of the Premier’s Office.
The other key job of the Treasury Board was to direct the government’s position on public sector collective bargaining. I’ll return to this topic later, because that’s what I ended up resigning over.
In political life, it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the here and now. The provincial government is so large that every day there is a crisis over here and a fire to put out over there. I found this to be particularly true when I was at ERDT: every week some business was on the brink of going under, some negotiation was going badly, somebody was threatening to sue. What the public sees in the news would be plenty to keep a government busy, but that’s only a fraction of what’s being juggled on any given day. It takes terrific focus to keep an eye on the longer-term issues that have to be tackled if real progress is to be made.
To keep that long-term focus, Darrell appointed a five-member Cabinet committee known as the policy and priorities committee. The importance of the committee was underlined by the fact that Darrell himself chaired it. The other members were Frank Corbett, Maureen MacDonald, Ross Landry, and me. This committee, universally known as “P & P,” would be supported by a dedicated secretariat led by deputy minister Dr. Rick Williams.
Rick Williams is a smart guy. His specialty is rural economic development, an area where he made his living as a consultant for almost twenty years after leaving a professorship at Dalhousie. He was well known within NDP circles and was appointed shortly after the Dexter government was sworn in. Rick had privileged access to the premier. He had, in fact, much greater and more regular access than any Cabinet minister.
The First Eight Months: Wasting the Honeymoon
After all those years in opposition, and with the seeming inevitability of our forming the government in 2009, you would think that we had a fully formed plan of action once we were sworn in. We didn’t.
I had been worried for a while that election preparation was trumping all thought of what we would actually do if we won, but I couldn’t find the right moment to express my concerns directly to Darrell. I ended up speaking with him, a week or two before the election call in 2009, on the sidewalk in front of the Centennial Building on Hollis Street. I asked him who was working on the policy plans for the first year of an NDP government. He replied that a transition team was in place. I thought he had misheard me, because I knew the transition team’s job was to plan only the first few weeks of government until the Cabinet settles in. I said so, and he looked at me blankly.
That’s when I really started to worry.
Darrell had engineered the slow, patient build to government. He was a conservative progressive, he said. He did not believe that Nova Scotians were voting for radical change. We thought we’d learned a lesson from the John Savage Liberals, who came roaring into office in 1993 with a big majority and an activist agenda. They launched into the frenetic “30-60-90” consultation and never really let up. That ambitious Savage government, loaded with talent, ended up with disastrously low levels of public support. In less than one mandate, John Savage was gone, and at the next election, the Liberals lost twenty-one seats.
So the Dexter government did not come to office with an activist agenda. There was no classic “First 100 Days” program, intended to impress voters with quick, noticeable change. Instead, we got busy being busy.
Rick Williams and his Office of Policy & Priorities set to work on the “core priorities” project. This was an agenda of four long-term objectives: better health care, creating good jobs and growing the economy, helping people make ends meet, and ensuring government lived within its means. If it worked, it would define what we were all about when we were asking voters for a second mandate. But this work began when we were sworn in, so of course Rick and his staff needed plenty of time to get going and start producing.
We commissioned two expert reports, one from management consultants Deloitte, which reported in August and again in November, and the other from a panel of eminent policy experts, which reported in November. The expert panel included Donald Savoie as chair — one of the smartest people in Atlantic Canada, if not the country — along with eminent economists Tim O’Neil, Elizabeth Beale, and Lars Osberg.
The House also had to meet to pass a budget. The fiscal year was already half over. So we essentially passed the Conservative budget, adjusted for more realistic assumptions. Even so, preparing the budget and making sure our ministers knew enough about their portfolios to handle a House session grabbed time and energy that could more productively have been spent elsewhere.
And so, with the best of intentions — working on core priorities, commissioning expert reports, delivering a budget, figuring out what was really going on — we squandered our first eight months in office. Every new government gets a honeymoon, which can last up to a year, during which people are hopeful and willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Like a bashful groom, we wasted our honeymoon by thinking and talking rather than doing.
We had not begun to define ourselves before the auditor general’s report on MLA expenses came out and defined us, and especially Darrell, in a way from which we never recovered.