You could say that it was my signature that killed the Dexter government.
An election is called with an order in council, and it takes five signatures for an order in council to be valid. The OIC for the 2013 election was prepared and then walked around by Jeannine Lagasse, secretary of the executive council, to get the signatures. I was, on the afternoon of Friday, September 6, 2013, the fifth and final minister to sign the order in council dissolving the House and setting the date of the election. I signed it in Jeannine’s office, around 4:00 P.M., then headed over to the Old Triangle pub to celebrate with ERDT staff the previous day’s ferry announcement.
With my signature, the order in council was ready to go to the Lieutenant-Governor. The House of Assembly was dissolved, the election was on, and the Dexter government was done.
The Dexter government did plenty of good things. But it has not been my purpose in writing this book to praise the Dexter government, nor to condemn it. My purpose in writing this book has been to look at the political culture that formed the background to the rise and collapse of the Dexter government. Others can assess the Dexter government’s policy record better, and more objectively, than I can.
On a strictly political level, the Dexter government was a failure. The election verdict of October 8, 2013, was final and conclusive.
There are three broad explanations for why the Dexter government failed politically.
The first is that the economy dragged us down and would have dragged down any other government. We came into office at the beginning of a global recession. We hoped in 2009 that the Nova Scotia economy would recover in time for the 2013 election, but it didn’t. People were not feeling better off under the Dexter government, and it’s a short step from there to blaming the government.
The truth is that it was never within our government’s power to shield Nova Scotia from the recession. Nova Scotia is a tiny piece of the continental and global economy with limited natural resources and a dependence on imported fossil fuels for energy. A small change in interest rates or the US dollar exchange rate has more impact on the Nova Scotia economy than every combined tool available to the provincial government.
But everyone, the NDP included, long ago bought into the idea that the provincial government has a major impact on the economy. When we were in opposition, we blamed the government for any economic problems. When we were in government, we took credit for any economic successes. When the economy continued to drag through 2011 and 2012 and into 2013, we were caught in a trap that we’d set for ourselves. We couldn’t escape the blame. If this first explanation — that we were dragged down by economic circumstances over which we had little control — is right, then we should stop right there. It’s only the Rules of the Game that demand we go further. The Rules of the Game say that it has to be somebody’s fault.
The second broad explanation for why the Dexter government failed politically is that we were not up to the job. I don’t think it’s right — we had about the same amount of intelligence and ability as any other government I’ve seen — but if you’re already inclined to think this way it’s not hard to marshal a case.
You could say that we spent so long working toward winning that we forgot why we wanted to win. After our victory in June 2009, we were essentially making it up as we went along. Since we no longer had real policy objectives, only electoral objectives, we were buffeted by events. And during a recession, there are plenty of events. The issues that ended up defining us — a shipbuilding contract, a ferry, a couple of pulp mills, and an expense scandal — weren’t mentioned or even imagined during the 2009 campaign.
You could say that Darrell immersed himself in the wrong issues. If a premier is going to keep his head above water, he has to focus on a small number of winnable issues, own them, and get credit for good results. But the core priorities process, led by Rick Williams and the office of policy and priorities, essentially led nowhere and trickled out to nothing. The P & P committee of Cabinet stopped meeting, in favour of decision-making out of the Premier’s Office. The Premier’s Office, in turn, was consumed by the events of the day and lost sight of the big picture. So Darrell became immersed in, and defined by, events that he could not control and that he could not win.
You could say that our election in 2009 depended too much on Darrell’s public image. The Darrell Dexter that voters thought they saw in the 2009 election is, in fact, the real Darrell Dexter. He really is affable and smart. He really is the guy you want to go for a beer with. But by the 2013 election voters had lost faith in him. His popularity in 2009 lifted the party up, and his unpopularity in 2013 dragged the party down.
You could say that Darrell was too loyal to the people — Dan, Shawn, Matt, and Paul — who were around him during the slow build from the time he took the party’s leadership in 2001 to our election victory in 2009. Each, in his own way, brought experience and talent to the Premier’s Office. But when the poll numbers started dropping, they all — Darrell included — seemed unwilling to face it and unable to respond.
There’s a third explanation, and it is that we got so busy with governing that we forgot the Rules of the Game — like the fact that perception is reality. The reality is that provincial financial assistance was an essential element of the winning shipbuilding bid. The perception is we handed hundreds of millions of dollars to one of the richest families in Atlantic Canada. The reality is that we spent more per P–12 student than any previous government. The perception is we slashed education spending. The reality is that we took provincial sales tax off home heating. The perception is that we were too cozy with Nova Scotia Power.
The political jungle is governed by the Rules of the Game, but we started playing by the Laws of Finance. It was classic NDP — if only we could explain what we were doing and educate people, they would understand. Meanwhile our opponents kept playing by the Rules of the Game. We got our political heads handed to us on a platter.
Once you lose swing voters, it’s really hard to get them back. We started losing them after the MLA expense scandal, and we kept losing them. At a certain point, we reached a critical mass of unpopularity, after which we got blamed for everything. I’d seen it happen to other governments, and I watched bemusedly as it happened to us. The Metro Transit strike in February 2012, for example, was laid at Darrell’s door by riders who had to figure out how to get around in the middle of winter. Those were our people, and they were mad. They didn’t care that transit is municipal. They didn’t care that the NDP prefers resolutions to be negotiated, not imposed. They wanted Darrell to do something, and he didn’t.
I don’t know which of the three explanations is correct — maybe it was some combination of each — but it’s much too early to predict which particular narrative will take hold.
The closest analogy to what happened to the Dexter government is the Savage Liberal government in 1993. Like us, it too came to office in the middle of a deep recession. Only six years later, it was all gone. John Savage resigned in 1997, having sunk to very low personal approval ratings. Time has been kinder to the Savage government, and to John Savage himself, and I expect something similar will happen with the Dexter government. Much depends on how some of the longer-term Dexter policy initiatives — for example, the shipbuilding contract, the Maritime Link, and the Yarmouth ferry — actually play out.
The British politician Enoch Powell, in his biography of another British politician, wrote something which strikes at political ambition: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
On the happy side, then, are those who choose to get out when they’re in midstream, like Frank McKenna of New Brunswick or Gary Doer of Manitoba, both of whom resigned after ten years of premiership. For some, it is death in office that cuts them off in midstream, like Angus L. Macdonald or Michael Baker or the Kennedy brothers, though death seems a high price to pay for fond remembrance. Then there are the rest of us.
This is the dark side of politics, which doesn’t get talked about as much as it should. Losing an election can be devastating, or seem so. You feel like your neighbours have rejected you, even though you have worked long and hard for them. What was it all for? you ask, and maybe your spouse and your kids ask it too. Being away from home so much can put irreparable strains on marriage and family. As Robert Chisholm said to me once, everybody’s political career comes to an end, and when you go home at the end of it you want to be sure the ones you love are still there. Politicians are as subject as anyone to family troubles, to alcoholism and other addictions, to strains on physical and mental health. The hush-hush atmosphere that surrounds politicians’ personal problems only makes it worse.
When you enter the fray, the message “all political lives end in failure” is not one you are ready to receive. When you win an election, you float on a cloud for months. You don’t believe anything can touch you. And that’s why failure, when it arrives, hits so hard and hurts so much. If only you knew it was coming, it would do less damage. If you knew it was coming, just not when, you would work like hell to get stuff done before it arrived.
When I resigned as finance minister I knew my political time was up. That’s why I announced, at the same time I resigned from Cabinet, that I would not be a candidate in the next election.
I’m often asked if I’m thinking of running for Parliament or for the party leadership. Aren’t those the natural next steps?
I’m not interested in federal politics for the simple reason that the factors driving me away from provincial politics are magnified at the federal level. Politics in the House of Commons is aggressively nasty. Life is too short to get mixed up in that kind of thuggery. I also don’t want to be a party leader. I’ve seen many leaders come and go, in my party and in other parties, and I have a pretty good idea of what it takes. I don’t have what it takes, and I’ll spare Nova Scotians the ordeal of watching me prove it.
Even if I were thinking about re-engaging at some point, I would come with baggage. I have given the bad guys twelve years’ worth of words as hostages. My time as finance minister, in all its political and economic complexity, will be reduced to one-liners (“he raised taxes,” “he never balanced the budget,” “he added a billion dollars to the debt”). Besides, merely being associated with the Dexter government will be enough to dismiss anything I have to say, at least for a while.
After twelve years in the legislature and fifteen years in daily politics, I need a break from politics, and politics needs a break from me. I still believe in good public policy, but the best way for me to make a positive contribution to good public policy is to get out of politics.
I’m not keen on where our politics is headed. Starting in the United States, then moving into Canada at the federal level, politics has become a never-ending election campaign and a continuous marketing scheme. Modern politics haven’t arrived in their full glory in Nova Scotia yet, but they’re partly here, and the rest is coming soon enough.
Modern politics means you build a base of voters who will vote for you no matter what. You do whatever it takes to keep your base hungry and angry. If that means stoking resentment and creating division, you do it. You ignore anyone who isn’t thinking of voting for you, except to suppress their vote. You market yourself to the waverers by figuring out what they want and then promising it to them. You don’t just criticize your opponents, you demonize them. You don’t just demonize them, you destroy them. You claim credit for yourself and blame for your opponents and then repeat those claims, over and over. You undermine the source of any facts or arguments that run counter to your claims. Attack, attack, attack. It’s just politics.
Real governing — governing on behalf of all, governing by balancing interests, governing on the evidence — is hard. So in modern politics you govern to win the next election. Governing is fully subordinated to the politics of winning — but win for what? Why, to win, of course. You win to win. You win so the other guys don’t win. You win not to lose. You win because you can. This is the way that politics and parties are going, and I have no place in it.
These days the individual politician has vanished almost to nothing. A really good constituency politician knew the district, knew the people, knew who the opinion leaders were. Nowadays the Big Data people know a riding better than any politician could. A politician says, “But the people in my constituency won’t support that,” and the Big Data guy says, “You’re wrong, they do, or more importantly, the people in the 5 percent of your electorate that we’re targeting with this policy do support it.” The worst of it is that the Big Data guy is right. He’s got better information.
The days are gone when a politician can legitimately claim to know his or her riding better than anyone else. That is a profound change in our politics, because that constituency input was the only reason left for prime ministers or premiers to listen to their caucus. In the new politics, the role of the constituency politician is to feed the party’s database, which is used for ever more sophisticated marketing schemes. Our constituency politicians have less impact on governing than ever. That’s why they focus so much on constituency work and bringing home government money for this project or that organization. What else is left for them to do? It’s the only place where they get real, personal satisfaction. Their last hope is to be considered for a Cabinet post, because they imagine that Cabinet ministers, at least, have a say. But the new politics is heading toward the neutering of Cabinet ministers, too.
After fifteen years in daily politics, I am less a fan than I ever was of political parties. There isn’t that much difference between the parties in Nova Scotia. That may not seem much of a revelation to the cynics, but it was a revelation to me. The set of reasonable, thoughtful, moderate responses to the policy issues confronting us is small. If political leaders were bowling pins, then all the leaders I’ve seen in Nova Scotia could be knocked over with one ball. There are differences between them in emphasis, but that’s all. So I have come to believe that parties do more harm than good.
Frankly I have trouble explaining what ideological labels — like conservative, liberal, social democrat, what have you — have to do with everyday political decision-making. It is not conservatism that is going to help you decide how to handle an allegation of decades-old sexual and physical abuse at a public institution. It is not socialism that is going to help you decide whether there should be nine or four or two regional health authorities.
Besides, if constituency work is what most MLAs are doing most of the time — and it is — then party labels are irrelevant. There is no difference among the parties in their approach to constituency work. There are good constituency politicians, and bad ones, in every party.
Parties are supposed to supply predictability and stability to the political system. Without parties, the voter could vote for the best local candidate but wouldn’t have any idea what to expect from the government. The problem with this theory is that we have parties, and the voter still doesn’t have any idea what the government will do. Platforms are marketing documents. The parties manufacture differences for election purposes, then once they become government, they face the same challenges, options, and constraints as the last government, which leads to remarkably similar decisions.
An alternative path would be to promote more Independent candidates. I love the idea, if I were an Independent MLA, of listening to everyone and then making up my own mind on the issues of the day, in a way that makes the most sense for my constituents. I might be influenced by others, I might occasionally ally myself with others, I might tend to vote similarly to others, but the final decision on every vote would be mine, guided only by my conscience and my constituents. Sitting as an Independent would be liberating.
It is, unfortunately, formidably difficult for an Independent to be elected. Reaching out to voters takes plenty of time and money, and parties help to get the message out in a way that an Independent cannot. That’s why very few people are elected as an Independent in Nova Scotia. Paul MacEwan and Billy Joe Maclean did it in the 1980s, but nobody has succeeded since. And MacEwan and Maclean were unique, colourful characters.
Here are a couple of other, more radical ideas.
What if we formed a government from the best people in the whole House? We’re more likely to get the best Cabinet timber if the starting pool is fifty-one, rather than thirty-three (McNeil), thirty-one (Dexter), thirty or twenty-five (Hamm), twenty-three (MacDonald), or nineteen (MacLellan). A team of decent, hardworking, honest people, who are guided by the facts and open to vigorous but respectful debate, are worth more than all the partisans in the world. This system would encourage more Independents and more independent thinking.
But even a pool of fifty-one is too limited. What if only some of the Cabinet had to come from the House and the rest came from the best that Nova Scotia could offer? It’s not an absolute constitutional requirement that ministers be elected to the House, although that’s certainly the convention. But the premier and elected ministers could answer in the House for any unelected minister.
Yes, I know: these are crazy ideas, and there are plenty of other crazy ideas. But if I’ve learned one big thing from my time in politics, it is that the current way of doing things is not working to make life better for Nova Scotians. The parties invent differences between them. The House is a charade. Our politicians follow the Rules of the Game. The real issues are hard, and our current system allows our politicians to avoid dealing with them.
For the public good, something different has to be done. Something different has to be tried. We have to stop reaching for escape hatches and justifying the status quo. Otherwise, we’ll just keep watching the same bad movie, over and over.
I worry when I see bright-eyed new politicians. Politics is a low, dirty business, but they don’t believe it, or they think to themselves “I’m different. I’ll rise above it.” They’ve haven’t learned yet that politics has chewed up and spat out people better, smarter, and tougher than them. By the time they figure that out, it’s too late.
So we have a steady stream of new politicians, myself included, who get into politics with the best of intentions. But nobody is an exception to Enoch Powell’s maxim that all political lives end in failure, because that is — as he said — the nature of politics and of human affairs. We ex-politicians look back, and it’s hard to see our footprints in the sand. We thought we would make a difference. We didn’t. We thought we were better than whoever we replaced. We weren’t.
Sure, all politicians can list accomplishments. It’s not possible to be in elected office and accomplish literally nothing. Every Nova Scotia government has control of billions of dollars. It has its fingers in a thousand pies. Every government is going to do something right, and in fact every government does a lot of things right. Even the politician who never makes it to government is going to do good work around the constituency. But what we ex-politicians don’t want to admit is that someone else in the same seat would have done the same or similarly worthy things.
It’s too easy to say we need better politicians. They don’t exist, and the search itself can be dangerous because it’s just another escape hatch, and it leaves us vulnerable to political charlatans.
The fact is that our politicians are us. There isn’t a better, more perfect, more angelic version of us. The people who are elected to office used to be us, and once they’re in office, they respond in human ways to the pressures of the job. You would do the same if you were elected.
Yes, you would.
And if you think you wouldn’t, you’d be one of those bright-eyed politicians who didn’t know what they were getting into.
Our politics are in a bad way because politicians succeed by following the Rules of the Game, and the Rules of the Game are incompatible with good government. The Rules of the Game are stronger than anything else. They’re stronger than common sense and civility. They’re stronger than logic, arithmetic, and science. They’re stronger than any values or principles that the new politician brings with him or her.
Politicians follow the Rules of the Game because they work. They work to win votes, and votes mean re-election. The Rules of the Game will change when they stop working. The only person who is in a position to make that happen is the individual voter — in a word: you.
Winston Churchill said, “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy, is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the overwhelming importance of that point.” With due allowance for the era in which he was speaking — we might prefer “person” instead of “man,” and the technology of voting will change — Churchill was putting his finger on the basic miracle of democracy. The whole modern effort of politics is directed at influencing how “the little person” will vote. Everything — the invention of differences, the attention-grabbing rhetoric, the focus on scandal and personality, the refusal to deal with the real issues, the devaluing of legislative work in favour of constituency work, the selection of candidates, everything — is aimed at winning your vote. It’s a permanent marketing campaign, not fundamentally different from the marketing campaign of a company trying to sell you laundry detergent.
There will always be people who buy a box of laundry detergent because it’s what their parents used, because it’s what they’ve always used, because a friend recommended it, because they like the colour of the box, because they like the ads, because there’s a coupon — anything but what’s actually in the box. They’ve used it before and it works well enough, and they have better things to do than to study the chemistry of laundry detergent.
Voters can be like that, too. For those who are open to voting more than one way, politics can be bewildering. The political marketers know that, and they want to make it simple.
The main difference between political marketing and consumer marketing is that consumer marketing has standards. There are, for example, truth-in-advertising rules that limit what the company can claim about its own product or say about its competitors’ product. In politics, there are no standards and no limits. We can’t control the political marketing message coming at us, but we can control how we react to it. If there is hope, it lies in the space between when the political message is received and when we react. The political marketers would like the reaction to be instant — in fact they depend on it — but it doesn’t have to be instant.
There is a space between reception and reaction, and we can train ourselves first to recognize the space, then to control it. We can control it, for example, by learning about the marketing techniques that are being used on us; by finding reliable sources of information and analysis; and by spotting when our politicians are following the Rules of the Game or reaching for an escape hatch, and asking them to stop and get back to the real issues.
It is not our politicians who will lead the change. The only person who can change our politics is the engaged citizen.
And so I found myself in the CBC studio on election night.
The NDP had been trailing the Liberals in the polls since the middle of 2012, and by the beginning of the campaign, the Liberal lead was 10 percentage points. In order to make up that much ground during a campaign, the NDP would have had to come out with a focused, hard-hitting attack campaign, and the Liberals would have had to run a weak campaign and suffer some idiot eruptions.
Within a week, it became obvious that the NDP would be running a safe, middle-of-the-road campaign, and the Liberals would be smart and calm. Stephen McNeil and the Liberals campaigned on a platform that essentially consisted of not being Darrell Dexter and the NDP.
The Liberal lead widened.
I participated very little in the campaign. My main contribution was playing Stephen McNeil in the three leadership debate rehearsals with Darrell. I lacked McNeil’s stature, but I found the role easy to play. Stephen McNeil takes a very traditional approach to politics. He plays by the Rules of the Game, and after fifteen years in the business, I know how to act the part.
By now, we all know the results of Election 2013. The Liberals won 45 percent of the vote, which is, coincidentally, the same share won by the NDP in 2009. This was good for thirty-three seats, including most of the Halifax Regional Municipality. The NDP sank to only seven seats. The Conservatives had a stronger showing than in 2009, though not by much — 2 percent more vote and one more seat — but they benefitted from a sense of upward momentum, especially in contrast to the NDP debacle. The Conservatives formed the official opposition.
On September 7, 2013, with the issuing of the writ of election, I had ceased to be an mla.
On October 22, 2013, with the swearing in of the new government, I ceased to be a Cabinet minister. I was out of politics for the first time in fifteen years.
And now that my political career has ended, I have finally learned enough about politics to get started.