1.
The Election Of 2013:
“The Arse Is Right Out Of ’Er”

October 8, 2013. It’s election night in Nova Scotia, and for the first time since 1998, I’m not sitting in a campaign office. Instead, I’m part of CBC TV’s on-air election team in their studios on Bell Road in Halifax, along with anchors Tom Murphy and Amy Smith and veteran political reporter Paul Withers.

When Amy first called to ask me to join CBC for election-night coverage, back in the spring, I had one hesitation: I didn’t want to be merely “the NDP voice” on a panel of partisans. After fifteen years in politics, I was done with partisanship. Amy assured me that wasn’t what the CBC was looking for, so I said yes.

And what fun it is to see the CBC’s operation from the inside. There are five rehearsals, with mock results pouring in, spread over three days. We practice two Liberal landslides, two Liberal squeakers, and an NDP squeaker. We don’t practice a Conservative win of any kind.

The pre-election polls were showing a big Liberal lead. A poll released by Corporate Research Associates a few days before the election call pegged the Liberals at 41 percent, the NDP at 31 percent, and the Conservatives at 25 percent. It seemed unlikely that experienced outfits like CRA, who have always correctly called election outcomes, could be wrong about such a large Liberal lead.

Despite all the rehearsals at CBC, and despite knowing that the incumbent NDP government is almost certainly going down to defeat, my heart starts beating rapidly as we count down the last seconds to going live. This is a familiar feeling for candidates on election night. No matter how confident you are, you don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. The most tense time is the ten minutes between the closing of the polls and the first results. I’m a commentator now, not a candidate, but still I’m nervous. The verdict on my four years as a minister in the Darrell Dexter government — and really the verdict on all of my fifteen years in Nova Scotia politics — is bound up in the result.

As soon as the votes do start rolling in, shortly after eight o’clock, the trend is clear. The pre-election polls were right. The Nova Scotia Liberals under Stephen McNeil are heading for a comfortable majority government.

As the night wears on, the verdict on Nova Scotia’s first NDP government is devastating. Cabinet ministers are going down to defeat, and for most it’s not even close: John MacDonell in Hants East, Ramona Jennex in Kings South, Charlie Parker in Pictou West, Ross Landry in Pictou Centre, and Maurice Smith in Antigonish. Outstanding constituency work cannot save Clarrie MacKinnon in Pictou East, Pam Birdsall in Lunenburg, or Mat Whynott in Sackville-Beaver Bank. MLAs who normally win easily, like Dave Wilson in Sackville-Cobequid and Maureen MacDonald in Halifax Needham, find themselves in nail-biters. Frank Corbett won Cape Breton Centre in 2009 with 80 percent of the vote, the largest majority in the province. Now our deputy premier looks like he might lose. How can I describe all this? I reach for a Cape Breton expression Frank introduced to the Dexter government, and which had become a wry in-joke: “The arse is right out of ’er,” I say.

Then the ultimate humiliation: the premier is defeated in his own seat. You have to go back to 1925 and a forgotten man named Ernest Armstrong to find the last time a sitting Nova Scotia premier lost his seat. Rodney MacDonald, whose tenure as premier was shorter than Darrell’s, handily won his own seat in 2009 even as voters sent his Conservative government packing. So did former premier Russell MacLellan, one of only eleven survivors when his Liberal government was crushed in 1999.

The Liberals take seat after seat in the Halifax Regional Municipality, supposedly the NDP’s stronghold, eventually winning twenty of twenty-four. My own constituency of Halifax Fairview no longer exists after being cut in half in the 2012 redistribution, but both the southern half (now part of Halifax Armdale) and the northern half (now part of Fairview-Clayton Park) fall to the Liberals, despite our having, in Drew Moore and Abad Khan, two smart, energetic candidates who did everything right. There is no question I would have been defeated had I been a candidate.

I watch all this calmly. My mind passes over the main events of my time in politics. Learning the political ropes, first as a caucus staffer then as an MLA. Supporting Darrell for the leadership of a divided party. Speaking out over MLA expenses and seeing Darrell angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Feeling responsible for a constituent going to jail. Swearing the oath as finance minister in Nova Scotia’s first NDP government. Driving through a blizzard in the Annapolis Valley. Delivering four budgets. Resigning from Cabinet, for reasons known to only a few. And then returning to Cabinet in 2013 in the strangest of circumstances.

Now it’s all over. My fifteen years in politics have come to — what? The first one-term government in over a hundred years. A premier defeated in his own seat.

What happened?

Let me try to explain.