I arrived in Nova Scotia for the first time on a drizzly day in August 1986. I knew nobody, and there was nobody to meet me at the airport. I was going to study at Dalhousie Law School and live at King’s College. A Winnipeg friend, Anne Gregory, had recommended this combination, but she had graduated and left by the time I arrived. I was alone.
I took the airport bus into town. As the bus crossed the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge over Halifax Harbour, the clouds parted and a beam of light shone on the city.
I took it as a good omen.
That first year, I hardly ventured outside a small radius around the Dalhousie campus. My only forays out of town were when Craig Scott, then a law student but now the MP for Toronto–Danforth, invited me to his family’s home in Windsor for Thanksgiving and another time when I spent a sublime autumn weekend at the monastery in Antigonish County. One day I walked to Agricola Street to look for used furniture, and it seemed an adventure. It was only in my second year, when I started dating an attractive classmate from Halifax, that I got as far as Clayton Park.
I had been interested in politics for as long as I could remember. Even as a boy, I would read all the political news as I delivered the newspaper around my Winnipeg neighbourhood. I was active in the Manitoba Young Liberals and worked in Ottawa as a summer student for a federal Cabinet minister, Lloyd Axworthy, who was my Liberal MP. But when I came to Halifax for law school, I paid no attention to Nova Scotia politics. I didn’t intend to stay in Nova Scotia, so what was the point?
One time in 1987 the King’s College president, John Godfrey, invited me to participate in an informal chat in his sunroom with his friends George Cooper and Mary Clancy. These three political junkies got together regularly to talk politics. George had been the MP for Halifax in the short-lived Joe Clark government in 1979–80. Mary would go on to defeat Stewart McInnes in the 1988 election and remained the MP for Halifax until her own defeat in 1997. John himself was elected five times to the House of Commons as the MP for Don Valley West, a seat he held from 1993 to 2008. These were political people, and I expected to enjoy the conversation, but that evening I found their political talk impenetrable. To me, politics was about policy, but they were talking about people — and as a newcomer I didn’t have a clue who they were talking about. Now, after fifteen years in politics, I know exactly why their focus was on people. Maybe someday John will reconvene the meeting with George, Mary, and me, and I will finally be able to join in. But that night I said hardly a word, and John never invited me back.
Toward the end of my last year in law school, I proposed marriage to that pretty Clayton Park classmate, and she said yes. I knew then that I would be staying in Halifax. She didn’t want to move to Winnipeg, a feeling that had been frozen into place by a visit one December, and neither did I. A summer spent working at a Bay Street law firm had persuaded me that Toronto was not the place for me either. We settled into life in Halifax. I was ready to get involved with Nova Scotia politics but didn’t know how.
One day we got a flyer in our mailbox from our MLA. Robert Chisholm had won a by-election just days before we moved into the constituency. The constituency had been represented for many years by Conservative premier John Buchanan, but he had left the premiership under a cloud in 1990 and taken a Senate seat. The Conservative government under Donald Cameron was not popular, and the people of Halifax Atlantic were ready for a change. Robert squeezed out a 504–vote victory over the Liberals. The Conservatives, who had held the seat for so long, were a distant third.
I responded to that flyer and dropped in on a meeting in Robert’s constituency office in the South Centre Mall. That’s when I joined the NDP. At the time, the Nova Scotia NDP had three seats in the legislature — Alexa McDonough and John Holm, plus Robert — so nobody could accuse me of being an opportunist. It wasn’t exactly the party to join if you wanted to be a mover and a shaker. Traditionally the big law firms made sure they had both Liberals and Conservatives. When the government changed, the patronage files were put into a cart and wheeled down the corridor to a lawyer from the new governing party, and then when the government changed again, the files were wheeled back. It had never occurred to them to stock up on New Democrats.
I joined the NDP because, when I read the newspaper or listened to the radio, the NDP was the only party talking about the issues that mattered to me: poverty, housing, a clean government. I’d been a Liberal in Manitoba, but politics in Nova Scotia seemed more tribal. Political allegiances seemed to depend more on family and place than on ideas. You were Liberal or Conservative because that’s what your family was. You would no more switch parties than you would switch your religion or your hockey team. I was still burning with the ideas of justice, equality, and fairness that I’d studied at Oxford and that had been reinforced at law school. I wasn’t interested in tribes. The only party talking about ideas was the NDP.
I started by joining the party’s policy review committee. The committee members were lovely people, but eventually it dawned on me that we were spending a great deal of time shuffling paper, with no discernible impact on our own caucus, never mind on the government. If I wanted to be where the action was, I had to be around the MLAs, or even better, I had to be an MLA.
The other thing I did for the NDP was more practical. A neighbourhood in Robert’s constituency was suffering from groundwater problems. I volunteered to survey the neighbourhood on Robert’s behalf. I knocked on all the doors, recorded all the information, and presented the results to Robert. Looking back on it now, I have no idea why an MLA was immersing himself (so to speak) in flooded basements. But it was, finally, an introduction to a different kind of politics than I’d experienced in Winnipeg or in Ottawa. It was about real problems experienced by real people where they lived. It was doorstep politics.
But then, in 1993, I took a job as in-house counsel to the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia, and I gave up any work for the NDP. The WCB had earned a reputation for being a political hot potato and a hotbed of patronage. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to question my work there. So I did nothing during the 1993 provincial election, which swept out the Conservatives. In the face of a Liberal landslide, the NDP was lucky to hold the three seats it had. Robert held Halifax Atlantic by only eighteen votes.
During my work at the WCB, I caught a few glimpses of the political life. Veteran MLA Paul MacEwan stood out because he would write detailed, passionate letters on behalf of his constituents. Often they would end up on my desk, as the WCB’s lawyer, because MacEwan was making arguments the staff couldn’t understand and didn’t know how to answer. He rarely won his point — mainly because he would ignore or misquote any bits of the law or evidence that didn’t fit his argument — but he kept on writing and writing and writing.
A more seasoned hand explained to me the realities of constituency work. Of course MacEwan wanted a favourable decision, but there was a larger objective: win or lose, he was showing his constituent that he was fighting. If the WCB’s answer was favourable, the constituent would give MacEwan the credit — even if the answer would have been favourable anyway. If the WCB’s answer was unfavourable, the constituent wouldn’t blame MacEwan, who had gone down fighting. As a politician, MacEwan won either way.
If political longevity is success, then Paul MacEwan was the most successful provincial politician of the last forty years. The people of Cape Breton Nova elected him nine times, for thirty-three years straight, first as a New Democrat, then as an Independent, then as a Liberal. But as I watched him, I wondered what lessons I was supposed to learn.
MacEwan was the most senior MLA, along with Bill Gillis, but unlike Gillis, he was not respected by his colleagues. His speeches were one part bombast, one part reminiscence, and the rest idiosyncrasy. When he finally made it to the government benches in 1993 after twenty-three years in opposition, his own party didn’t know what to do with him. John Savage named him Speaker, a role he filled controversially for three years. He was never named to the Liberal Cabinet, either by Savage or his successor, Russell MacLellan. When I started working for the NDP in 1998, MacEwan was a brooding presence on the Liberal backbenches.
I would wind up sitting beside MacEwan in the legislature, when my first term overlapped with his last. Although we were in different parties, I did literally sit beside him — he near the right rear of the Liberal seats, me at the left rear of the NDP seats, with only Wayne Gaudet between us. That’s why I was one of the first people to him when he suffered a brain aneurysm at his seat in the legislature in 2002. He had already suffered an aneurysm about a year before, within days of my election to the House. After this second aneurysm, he was never the same. He did not contest the 2003 election, and Cape Breton Nova was won by Gordie Gosse of the NDP. Paul MacEwan was a passionate advocate for his constituents, and they kept voting for him, over and over. Maybe that was the only lesson a young politician needed to know.
At the same time, I saw that it was possible to stay in politics too long, past the point of good health and past the point of being taken seriously. Too many politicians stay past their best-before date, because there’s nothing else for them to do. I was only just starting, but I hoped I would know when it was time to leave.
While I was at the Workers’ Compensation Board I also had the chance, for the first time, to see the legislature up close. The government was sponsoring a new Workers’ Compensation Act. It was the first time in eighty years that the workers’ compensation law had been completely overhauled. As the board’s lawyer, I had played a key role in writing the new law, and so I was taken along to meetings of the government caucus and the Cabinet. I observed how labour minister Jay Abbass shepherded the bill through the caucus, how Premier John Savage handled a Cabinet meeting, and later, how government House leader Richie Mann ran the business of the House.
Because I had spent so much time on the new law, I felt a special interest when the bill came before the legislature. I sat in the public gallery at Province House for long stretches, partly in support of Minister Abbass and partly out of curiosity. How did this place work?
I was surprised and disappointed. There were many long speeches, but no “debate” in the sense of a thoughtful exchange of views. The opposition didn’t understand how workers’ compensation really worked. They didn’t make a serious attempt to understand what the bill was proposing. Nobody was listening anyway. The government members sat silently, waiting for the clock to run out so they could vote for the bill and move on to other business. “Nobody should watch a law or a sausage being made,” Bismarck is supposed to have said (he didn’t, but it’s a good line), and I could see why. Lawmaking isn’t an appetizing spectacle.
I left the WCB in 1997 and returned to Dalhousie Law School to do a master’s degree. I was also ready to re-engage with the NDP. I made a lunch date with Robert Chisholm, who by this time was the party leader, and told him I was interested in putting my name forward as a candidate. I thought he would be keen, but he was non-committal. Maybe it was because he already had good candidates lined up where I lived and in all the surrounding constituencies. Maybe it was because I said I might contest Bill Estabrooks (who I had never met) for the nomination in Timberlea-Prospect, which would have revealed to Robert my political naivety. Whatever the reason for Robert’s lack of enthusiasm, my role in the 1998 provincial election was communications for Peter Delefes’s campaign in Halifax Citadel.
Peter won that election, by a handful of votes, and became the first New Democrat ever elected in the south end of Halifax. Many other New Democrats won that night, as the NDP exploded from four seats to nineteen, tying them with Russell MacLellan’s Liberals. The Liberals, as the governing party, kept their grip on power. The NDP had come within a hair of forming the government.
With the big breakthrough came the need for substantially more staff at the NDP caucus office. My graduate thesis was progressing slowly, I was running out of money, and my first child was on the way. When the opportunity to be the NDP’s research director came up, I jumped. I started work at the caucus office on July 6, 1998, my thirty-fourth birthday. I had finally entered the real world of politics. Not only that, but we all expected to be running the government within a year.
It took eleven.
Learning the Ropes at Province House
How do you learn politics? Real politics, not the stuff you learn in a Canadian government class in university. Electoral politics. Legislative politics. Winning politics.
The very first item I was assigned as research director was about mink farms. I was a Halifax-based lawyer with roots on the prairies. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about mink farms.
This is the way it is in politics: you have to know a little about a lot of different things. Name any topic, and for someone in Nova Scotia it’s the most important topic in the world. For the politician, it’s just the topic of the day. Yesterday it was a different topic, tomorrow it’ll be something else. So you learn just enough to get by, just enough to be “political” about it. Political knowledge isn’t real knowledge, but it’s less work, so you go with it.
I came to the job with a good set of skills in research and writing. I knew, for example, how to use the Freedom of Information Act and how to write punchy questions for question period. I knew my way around the law, which is handy when you have only a few minutes to analyze a government bill. From the WCB I had experience in bureaucratic decision-making. I knew many of the players in the civil service and how they thought. I knew all this, but I still knew nothing about politics.
My main teacher ended up being Dan O’Connor, the leader’s chief of staff. Dan is an Ontario native with Cape Breton roots. He has spent his entire adult life as a political strategist. He worked for the Manitoba NDP in the 1980s, earning praise (“remarkably able,” “I was most impressed by his abilities”) from former premier Howard Pawley in Pawley’s recent autobiography, Keep True: A Life in Politics. Then he was Alexa McDonough’s chief of staff, first when she was NDP leader in Halifax and then when she became federal NDP leader in 1995. He returned to Halifax a couple of years later to work as Robert Chisholm’s chief of staff. He kept that position through Helen MacDonald’s leadership, then Darrell Dexter’s, and was eventually chief of staff in the Premier’s Office of the Dexter government. He was, at all times in this story, the spider at the centre of the NDP web. The basics of opposition politics, as taught to me by Dan, were simple: Get in the news.
To get in the news, there has to be news, and not just rhetoric, in every news release. Get your facts straight, or the story will boomerang. Turn policy issues into human stories. Get non-politicians to validate what you’re saying. Keep it simple. Keep the stakeholders onside. If you’re going to challenge the government to do something, let it be something they can’t quite accomplish. Keep the caucus happy. Above all, protect and serve the leader, who is the face and the voice of the party.
I also learned by watching the caucus. Robert was aggressive — as it turned out, too aggressive — and his attitude rubbed off on the caucus and staff. Robert was close to Darrell Dexter, who I didn’t know. I learned that Darrell was a long-time strategist and organizer who was now himself in the legislature as the MLA for Dartmouth–Cole Harbour. As the NDP’s health critic, he was a solid performer, though not flashy. Of course John Holm stood out, as the New Democrat with by far the most experience and the loudest voice. Maureen MacDonald and Bill Estabrooks were also very good, as were Helen MacDonald and John MacDonell. Howard Epstein excelled in the public accounts committee as it dug into Ralph Fiske’s allegations about the Halifax casino. On the other end of the spectrum were a few MLAs who seemed befuddled by the whole experience.
The MacLellan government was propped up by John Hamm and his Conservatives, at least through the first year. The NDP under Robert was combative and open about its desire to see the government fall. By the spring of 1999 Hamm knew that continuing to support an unpopular government could only cause him damage. On June 17, 1999, the Liberal budget was defeated and an election was triggered.
The NDP readied itself to form the next government. How firm was this expectation? One day during the 1999 campaign I walked past Howard Epstein’s office. Howard was the finance critic. He was at his desk, pen in hand, writing columns of figures on sheets of foolscap. He was writing his first budget as NDP finance minister — during an election campaign.
In the end, of course, the voters delivered a sharp rebuke to the NDP, reducing us from nineteen seats to eleven. We never got the chance to see Howard’s budget. And Robert Chisholm, stung by the defeat and shamed by the late-campaign revelation of a drunk-driving conviction, resigned as leader.
Helen MacDonald and the By-election of 2001
At one point during the NDP’s 2000 leadership convention, held in the McInnes Room at Dalhousie, I was leaning against the side wall next to Frank Corbett. On the stage were the contenders: Helen MacDonald, Kevin Deveaux, Maureen MacDonald, Dave Peters, and Hinrich Bitter-Suermann. Frank leaned over and whispered, “Which cup of poison shall I drink?”
The convention chose Helen MacDonald after three ballots. Helen was well known inside the party, but virtually unknown outside it. She had won a by-election in 1997 in Cape Breton–The Lakes following the resignation of Bernie Boudreau and then repeated the win in the breakthrough 1998 general election. But she was one of the New Democrats who went down to defeat in 1999. When she won the leadership, she had less than two years’ experience as an MLA and was seatless.
Throughout her time as leader, Helen struggled to get in the news. When the legislature was in session, she camped out in the legislative library so she could be near the chamber and the media scrums. Paul MacEwan memorably referred to her as “Our Lady of the Library.”
Russell MacLellan had hung on after the Liberal defeat, but eventually he resigned his Cape Breton North seat. Helen knew she had to contest the by-election and get into the House if she were going to raise her provincial profile. Cape Breton North wasn’t quite her home area, but she had taught in the constituency for many years and was well known there.
Meanwhile, Eileen O’Connell, the NDP MLA for Halifax Fairview, had passed away in September 2000. The first time I worked on a Nova Scotia campaign, it was for Eileen in the 1996 by-election that followed Alexa’s departure for federal politics. The riding had gone to Alexa by a modest margin in the 1993 Liberal landslide, but by 1996 the Savage Liberals were deeply unpopular and Eileen won easily.
I did some canvassing for Eileen in the by-election, and I hated it. Any negative reaction threw me off. I took it personally. Even on a winning campaign, there were enough negative responses — whether from indifference, fear, or plain old crankiness — that I dreaded going out.
And then one day, it hit me like a thunderbolt: It’s not personal — any reaction is useful information. After that, canvassing was easy. I was no Peter Stoffer or Bill Estabrooks, the icons of NDP canvassing, but at least I’d gotten over my fear.
After Eileen’s passing, the question turned to who might carry the NDP banner in the by-election. I had been mulling for a while the possibility of being a candidate. It was the right time in my life. My work as an NDP staffer would obviously not get in the way of my candidacy. If I ran and lost, the job would still be waiting for me.
I told Dan O’Connor and Pam Whelan, the senior staff of the caucus office, that I was running for the nomination. They were surprised, and unenthusiastic. They seemed mostly concerned that other candidates might criticize the caucus office for favouritism. They bent over backwards to enforce the neutrality of caucus staff. Still, a couple of staffers quietly lent a hand. Ron Sherrard and Paul Black came to my house to hear me rehearse my nomination speech. I used an ironing board in my basement as a stand-in for the podium — a modest beginning to a hoped-for career in elected politics.
There is a world of difference between being a caucus operative and being a candidate. I was grateful for some advice I got from Denis Burgess, Robert’s long-serving constituency assistant: “People like it when you visit them at home.” If this was the Nova Scotia way, I would do it. I set about visiting every party member in Halifax Fairview.
I won the nomination on the first ballot, against three other candidates. I had worked for it by visiting all the members, drinking a lot of tea in a lot of kitchens, but I was lucky. I signed up everyone that I or my in-laws knew in the constituency, but that still wasn’t very many people. I had arrived in Nova Scotia fifteen years before, not knowing a soul, and I didn’t have neighbourhood roots or school friends or family networks to turn to. In fact I didn’t live in Halifax Fairview, and never did. The only thing that saved me is that two of the other candidates weren’t good organizers either, and the third entered the fray too late to make a dent.
Now, after fifteen years in politics, I tell would-be nominees the simple truth of nomination meetings: it’s not about issues, and it’s not about speeches. It’s about getting people to sign up as members, and then getting them to the hall to vote for you. If you walk into the meeting without knowing whether you’ve won, then you probably haven’t. But I didn’t know all this in January 2001. When it came to retail politics, I was an ignorant rookie.
Mercifully, John Hamm called the two by-elections only a week after my nomination, and election day was set for March 6. Mary Jane White, Eileen’s sister-in-law and a very experienced organizer, agreed to manage my campaign. She could have walked away from the NDP after Eileen’s passing, but she didn’t. I remain very grateful to her. Sadly, she too succumbed to breast cancer only a few years after Eileen.
The campaign was an education. February was particularly cold and icy, and I was outside for most of it. I almost always canvassed by myself, which was slow and lonely and stupid, but I didn’t know any better and I went at it day after day. My Liberal opponent was Jeremy Akerman, who had represented Cape Breton East through the 1970s for the NDP. I would hear that Jeremy was out canvassing, and that would force me out too.
Canadian politicians spend a lot of time going door to door, and it’s one of our strengths compared to politicians in many other countries. Once you’ve done it, you can never forget the faces, voices, and stories of the people you’ve met. It grounds you. Once people realize you’re not selling something, like chocolate bars or religion, they visibly relax, and are usually ready to talk.
My basic technique is to introduce myself and ask if there is anything they want me to know. That’s it. That interaction on the doorstep is about them, not about me. Try to open the tap, then listen. Nice and easy, no hard politicking. Not everybody does it that way, but that’s what works for me.
Halifax Fairview is an urban, residential community, with lots of variety packed into a small space. I met rich and poor, young and old, healthy and sick, long-established and new immigrant, friendly and obnoxious. I was warned away from the guy with a reputation for a violent temper, kept away from the dogs (who were mostly inside anyway, since it was February), and on the worst weather days, worked the apartment buildings. Among the many encounters during that first campaign, I remember the woman struggling to care for her husband with advancing Alzheimer’s; the man who would never support the NDP because a union hadn’t supported his father fifty years before; the senior whose advice was simply “remember the seniors”; and the woman who ran after me down the street and became one of my best campaign workers.
I learned how beloved a good politician like Alexa McDonough can be. When I knocked on doors with her, my constituents were far more excited to see her than to meet me. I was touched, too, by the people who told me about Alexa’s father, Lloyd Shaw. I am very sorry that I never met Lloyd, because he must have been something special. Decades after he had canvassed the same streets, people in Fairview were still talking about him.
I was also introduced to voter cynicism. One common refrain I heard was “You’re all the same.” Another was “What difference does it make if I vote or not?” The most extreme example of cynicism was the woman who opened her door, pointed her finger at me and said, “You’re all liars, and I’m not going to vote for any of you” and slammed the door.
It’s hard to get used to being seen as just another lying politician. This early encounter on the doorstep, before I’d done anything and before anyone knew who I was, was a warning: no politician starts with a clean slate.
Election day was one of the worst days of the winter. A strong, cold wind blew sleet sideways all day. I knocked on one supporter’s door to offer a ride to the polls. My face was crusted with ice. She looked out at the wind and the sleet, and at me, and flat-out refused to leave her home. I pleaded, but she shook her head and said, “There’s no way I’m going out in this.”
Voter turnout that day was under 29 percent, a record low for a provincial by-election. When historians are puzzling over the low turnout, I hope they don’t come up with any fancy theories. The reason is simple: the weather was awful. The good news is that of the people who did turn out, 58 percent voted for me.
I was the new MLA for Halifax Fairview.
Over in Cape Breton North, which was also holding a by-election that day and where the weather was much better, voter turnout was a healthy 68 percent. The bad news was that our leader, Helen MacDonald, came a disappointing third in a contest won by Cecil Clarke, later a Cabinet minister in the Hamm and MacDonald governments and now the mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.
Despite the loss, Helen was determined to carry on as leader. This caused concern among some of my caucus colleagues. I had little involvement in the drama that ensued. It didn’t play out the way people thought. There was no full caucus meeting where her resignation was demanded. There was no letter from caucus members asking her to step down. There was only a phone call from Frank Corbett to John Hugh Edwards, who had been Helen’s leadership campaign manager and who remained in her inner circle. Frank was loyal to Helen but told John Hugh that six caucus members wanted to meet with her. A couple of days later, on April 24, 2001, without any meeting actually taking place, Helen resigned.
I was not part of the group that wanted to meet with Helen, but I do not blame them for being concerned. Helen had struggled with her political profile. Her departure was close to inevitable after the by-election loss. The request for a meeting to discuss her future should have been expected.
In the midst of this turmoil, I heard John MacDonell and Darrell Dexter discuss whether Helen had what it took to lead us. John remarked that Helen’s image was “out of date.” Darrell’s memorable reply was “loyalty is never out of date.” I noted that Darrell didn’t disagree with John. He simply put a higher value on loyalty.
I like loyalty too, but it has limits. I couldn’t see how Helen would appeal to the electorate. I’d just been elected under her leadership, but my election was due to the groundwork in the constituency by Alexa McDonough, Robert Chisholm, and Eileen O’Connell, coupled with local dislike for a Conservative government well past its honeymoon and a leaderless Liberal party that people had not yet forgiven for the turmoil of the Savage years. Helen had been a non-factor for me in the by-election.
There was no rush to push Helen out. We were facing a majority government. We were two years away from an election. She had won the leadership less than a year before. There were good reasons why party members had picked her over Kevin and Maureen. She had solid regional support from Cape Breton members. She seemed more likely than Kevin or Maureen to expand the party’s base outside Halifax. But sometimes what makes sense on the convention floor, when people are voting their second or third choice, doesn’t make sense to the general public — ask Joe Clark, Stockwell Day, Stéphane Dion, Russell MacLellan, Rodney MacDonald. That’s where we were with Helen.
I went on CBC TV that evening as a Helen supporter. I shared the interview with Kevin Deveaux, who argued that Helen’s departure was unfortunate but necessary. I was a rookie MLA, only weeks into the job, and here was my party tearing itself up over leadership. It was not what I wanted my first in-studio television interview to be about. Later I went to Helen’s apartment at the Carleton Hotel, a couple of blocks uphill from the legislature. A few supporters were gathered to commiserate. Helen had seen my CBC interview and gave me a hug.
Helen MacDonald is a thoroughly pleasant, deeply decent person. Some said she was too schoolmarmish, too naive, not electable. Maybe that’s so, but why shouldn’t someone like her be able to succeed in politics? Now, more than a decade after her brief leadership, she is barely remembered. All political careers end in failure, but it is your own party that will really break your heart. That was certainly true in Helen MacDonald’s case. After that gathering in her apartment, I rarely saw her again.
Helen’s departure created considerable bitterness in the party. My colleagues who had wanted to discuss Helen’s future with her were reasonable people who had reasonable concerns following the by-election loss. But Helen’s supporters were not in an understanding mood. At the next party convention there was a movement to censure the six caucus members who had wanted to meet with Helen. There was a heated debate behind closed doors. If Helen had chosen to stay and fight, the party could have faced an ugly war. But she was already gone, and her supporters knew they had to move on.
After Helen’s resignation, Darrell Dexter started making the rounds within caucus, looking for support to be named as interim leader. The decision on interim leadership belonged to the party’s council, but the caucus’s recommendation would carry considerable weight.
There are, within the Nova Scotia NDP, two broad factions. They overlap, and individuals slide from one to the other, but there are two. One is moderate, pragmatic, centrist. The other is more contrarian, more ideological, less accommodating. Faction 1 sees Faction 2 as inflexible, pushy troublemakers. Faction 2 sees Faction 1 as weak, liberal sellouts. Faction 1 is larger and almost always carries the day at party meetings, but Faction 2 is louder.
Darrell Dexter is the incarnation of the first faction.
Among the names being mentioned in the media as possible leadership contenders was my own. I was a fresh face, I could make a speech, and my work as research director gave me a superficial command of all the issues of the day, plus familiarity with provincial journalists. My lack of political experience should have immediately eliminated me as a contender, but it didn’t. I never intended to run for the leadership, but I enjoyed the attention and was happy to string it along for a little while.
One night, Darrell drove me home from the legislature, for the first and only time. We both knew he wanted to talk about the leadership. We chit-chatted during the fifteen-minute drive. When we got to my driveway, we got down to the real business. I told him I would not be a contender. We talked about the two factions in the party, and I told him we were in the same faction. I would support him for the leadership. I wouldn’t say that I was excited about Darrell’s leadership bid. He was not charismatic or bold, but rather safe and solid, which are harder qualities to sell to the public. But he was my kind of New Democrat, and I definitely didn’t want the other faction to take control of the party.
The other faction coalesced around John MacDonell, which was odd, because he wasn’t one of its natural members. Maureen and Kevin opted not to enter the race, even though it was such a short time after their 2000 leadership runs. Both supported John. Howard Epstein, who is the incarnation of the contrarian faction, also supported John.
Darrell easily won the leadership convention, held in the McNally Auditorium at Saint Mary’s University. For the first time ever, the leadership was decided by a vote of the full membership. The convention was low-key because almost all the votes were already in the box when it started. Darrell’s margin of victory was roughly 2:1, which is a good approximation of the two factions’ strength.
And so began the slow, patient build that culminated in the election victory of 2009.