babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Nova Scotia Election Campaign- discussion continued
May 22, 2009 - 1:02pm
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27-28 May
Anybody have links or info for these? First one must me election related. Second I know what it is from last year, but have no info.
Here's a perspective from the South Shore (Queens, Lunenburg West, Lunenburg).
First, you can't tell much from the NDP results in Queens and Lunenburg West last time. The Liberals missed the nomination deadline in Queens, giving Vickie Conrad a direct shot at the PCs. Her best initiative, to modernize the school bus system by replacing the old Blue Birds with modern buses and running a proper rural transit system with at least one night run plus the two school runs, hasn't been taken up by the NDP as a party, despite the fact that almost all students on the South Shore will soon be bused to their schools. A lot of people shudder to think of all those trips in all that weather for all those years - a tragedy is all but inevitable given the older buses and the diluted maintenance schedules of running a separate school and everyone-else transit system, they have to be unifed.
If this becomes an issue in the campaign, Conrad will likely hang on. if not, expect the PCs to retake Queens.
In Lunenburg West the provincial NDP ran Bill Smith last time but he shifted to the Liberal federal nomination in 2008, coming third. Any momentum from this race was lost. Gary Ramey of the NDP has decent support, is an educated guy with a PhD but unknown to a lot of rural people. Carolyn Bolivar-Getson is a known quantity, has held many cabinet posts, and quite likely to retain her seat here. Mark Furey, the Liberal, has nowhere near the campaign organization of the others, and will likely run third.
An issue that affects both Lunenburg West and Queens is the deployment of the fixed wireless "universal broadband" network based on Motorola Canopy 900MHz. It's been very difficult to get any answers from Eastlink, the contractor, about the service, or the province about the contract - no one can find out for instance if there is a guaranteed minimum latency (for VoIP or gaming or virtual private networks) in that contract. The election will be over long before anyone finds out, but politicians that didn't ask or do not seem to care about the rural regions emptying out will find it hard to win re-election.
Power outages in these regions are also very common due to weather, and Liberal leader McNeil has made a huge issue of this. If he can keep raising the issue of Nova Scotia Power's primitive eyeball-and-truck methods of maintenance, which are a joke compared to the modern Aliant XWave network deployed by NB Power and NL Hydro (the latter including phone and data to homes as part of the power offering), he can win Liberal votes here. Since the NDP are either clueless or silent about what they'd do to modernize the power grid, and Dexter has publicly taken the position that government's duty is to keep even dirty coal power cheap, the odds that the NDP would force any re-investment in the power grid are low. This is an issue the NDP could well lose two seats on - they are outclassed by McNeil who has made a big point of emphasizing his visits to NL to work on a power corridor with Danny Williams, and his insistence on using tax revenues from taxing coal power to ensure that the grid gets quickly modernized.
In Lunenburg the PCs lost Michael Baker but residual PC energy will likely elect Peter Zwicker, a well liked Councillor. Gerald Keddy, the Conservative MP, has lent some staff to this effort. Keddy's wife, Judy Streatch, showed up at Zwicker's campaign launch. The strategy here is to be tactical: Put up new signs every few days, add stickers to them, keep Zwicker's name top of mind, and so on. Zwicker won the nomination over another candidate who promotes active lifestyles, running Iron Man marathons in his 60s, so expect at least some of the Lunenburg race to focus on health and lifestyle promotion issues. This may include promoting the rural bus system, if only to head off the NDP and allow people to bicycle and walk more, and to keep seniors living in their homes longer. Another issue the PCs are well aware of is the trend to local food, which is benefitting Lunenburg immensely due to it's active farmer's market, thriving local specialty food businesses, and keeping the lobster fishery alive in a time of very low prices.
NDP are running Pam Birdsall who is from Mahone Bay, where she headed a sustainability committee, but it's a smaller community so her base is narrow compared to Zwicker. Since the Greens have nominated in Lunenburg (there was some concern among them that they wouldn't have anyone, it was one of the last ridings they filled) her chances have diminished a bit. The Liberal is however not well known so she probably gains more back from that.
All three of these races are basically viewed as NDP vs. PC races with the Liberal as the spoiler. The struggle is for Liberal votes from all four directions (NDP, PC, Liberal, Green) so expect the issues McNeil raises to be the ones that these seats are won or lost on. The first debate suggests also that McNeil is running a positive issues-based campaign while Dexter and MacDonald attack each other on "trust". So while MacDonald says "take the bus" and Dexter attacks him for it, McNeil actually announces $10M for rural transit systems. It's really not surprising that the Liberals moved from third to second place, and the PCs are back in third, but the NDP can't break through to majority position. Even the things MacDonald did very well (like conservation focused electricity policy, or e-waste, or improved sewer systems, or rural broadband networks) he can't seem to string together into a coherent single narrative. Dexter's story, while mostly a pile of pandering drivel about "today's families" and cheap dirty coal power as a good thing, and hatred of Conservatives, is at least consistently appealing to a single segment of the population, the clueless poor who are too scared to think about next year, let alone climate change or economic development in new industries. MacDonald may well get burned for bad timing, as his most visible initiatives (like rural broadband) won't be actually felt until September in this region, and his most effective ones (like Halifax's new sewage system, or Conserve Nova Scotia, or the level playing field between newly generated and conserved power) have all been obscured or gone temporarily awry by scandals in implementation, personnel issues (like Conserve NS being run by his former mistress and Chief of Staff) or incompetence at NS Power / HRM. It's an inept campaign, which you can evaluate for yourself at http://riskyndp.ca - meanwhile his candidates don't all have twitter or facebook pages?!? Ow.
PCs are trying to attack carbon "tax" again, as if there's any choice about joining Obama's cap and trade system. Well there isn't, and oil is 1/3 the price it was when this strategy worked for Keddy and Harper, and McNeil wants to knock a penny off the gas tax, so this is likely to fail. People worried about fuel costs are already looking for smart grids so they can charge electric vehicles, it's not like they don't watch the news. They are way more likely to respond to McNeil's plan to deal with this, than mutual attack ads.
The NDP candidates, and McNeil at least, are making very good use of facebook, especially to coordinate their own teams. See
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stephen-McNeil/19853187485
It's really quite striking how substantive the Liberal campaign is, and how focused on infrastructure, power, transport and other very basic issues. If the NDP and PCs don't wake up and start responding on substance, McNeil could well end up as Premier on June 9.
South Shore people are waking up to the fact that Halifax Regional Municipality, and the Annapolis Valley, have things like working transit systems and universal wired broadband that we don't have. And we're losing population, especially young, because of that.
Relatively simple strategies could work for either the NDP or PCs: McNeil says smarten up the grid, fine, either Dexter or MacDonald could talk about deploying gigabits to every AC outlet with powerline networking, paying for it with energy conservation as they are now doing in Australia. McNeil says $10M for transport, fine, either Dexter or MacDonald could lay out a shared car or flexible car insurance scheme that would eradicate uninsured drivers and people forced to leave their homes due to high car insurance prices (a huge issue in the last election). McNeil says improve vehicle inspection, either Dexter or MacDonald could take junkers off the road as they have in California. McNeil wants the HST left on electricity, either Dexter or MacDonald could take it off of peak levelling and renewable power, while increasing the price on dirty coal power and devoting it to even more radical improvements to home design. This election is all about infrastructure and basic policies to take Nova Scotia out of the recession. It's actually sad that only one of the three major parties seems to have any ideas worth extending or copying, while the others let their own good candidates' ideas rot and engage in endless attack ads.
It is now illegal for MPs to 'lend staff' to provincial campaigns. That is with the 2006 changes to election financing: provincial parties or their various campaigns are ot allowed to take monetary or in kind contributions from a federal entity.
I suppose anyone who really wanted to inconvenience Keddy, Streatch, Zwicker and MacDonald would report this to Elections Nova Scotia and trigger yet another scandal around Keddy and Streatch who broke Cabinet rules regarding vehicles resulting in a crash by Streatch's teenage son.
It's no secret, Streatch announced the lending of staff from Keddy to Zwicker's campaign at Zwicker's campaign launch on May 14th. If anything "illegal" is going on, in their minds, they would not have announced it. But ignorance of changes in the law is no excuse, and federal/provincial money sharing is an unfair advantage when a rich federal party gets to subsidize a provincial one, or even vice versa.
"Gary Ramey of the NDP has decent support, is an educated guy with a PhD but unknown to a lot of rural people. Carolyn Bolivar-Getson is a known quantity, has held many cabinet posts, and quite likely to retain her seat here. "
I don't buy this at all, and it makes me wonder about the rest of this analysis. Gary Ramey is well-known throughout Lunenburg West. He worked for the Community College in Bridgewater for a number of years, running a successful joint program with the local high schools. In his other life, he plays in the local rock group Twist of Fate, which has performed at pretty well every volunteer fire hall and community centre up and down the LaHave.
Bolivar-Getson made a hash of Environment and was hastily shuffled out. She was a fiasco at Immigration - the business mentorship scandal reached its apex under her. She was hastily shuffled out. She was kept in Cabinet after a fall caused a serious concussion and ongoing neurological problems, but demoted to Minister of several minor offices and agencies. After the January shuffle she went into Natural Resources, where insiders say she has been the weakest Minister in memory over the past few months, and the Department has been entirely under staff control.
People working on Ramey's campaign report widespread disgust with the MacDonald government. If she were one of the couple of capable ministers like Karen Casey, or had a huge base of popularity - someone like NDP Maureen MacDonald in Halifax Needham, who had over 60% last time - it might be different.
But I very much doubt B-G will survive.
As for the rest of the anti-NDP vitriol in this post - not worth the electrons. Someone's clearly very, very scared.
If you think working in town and playing rock gigs down the river gets you votes among fishers and farmers, you are very confused.
There is no contradiction between these facts and what I said. If you think a serious concussion and neurological problems is a reason to fire someone from their job, you may be out of touch with the labour movement's own attitudes about such things. And while I agree she's a weak Minister, most voters reasonably expect that all Departments would be "entirely under staff control" due to the conflict of interest between a party backed by public sector unions and their bosses. MacDonald is playing on this hard, and it's got a lot of traction. Right or wrong, people perceive Bolivar-Getson sympathetically and as a local businessperson and one who is not easy for the public service to bully. She didn't stay in any one post long enough for any of those scandals to really stick to her, so if you want to continue this attack ad approach you would be best off restating this more sympathetically like "she needs a rest".
As with both the PC and NDP attack ad based campaigns you are reporting rumours as fact, after talking only to your own friends. I suppose we should be grateful you're not simply making up fake people as the PC "riskyndp.ca" campaign does. There's just as much "widespread disgust" with NDP pandering and unfulfillable promises probably, if you want to win elections in the South Shore you will have to learn there's a difference between listening and rumour-mongering and in rural areas people respect the former not the latter. Most people in rural areas have been victims of vicious smear campaigns at one time or another, and it's not going to win the NDP any friends if they start sanctioning that kind of tactic regarding their opponents. If you want to say "Carolyn should have done this in that post" or "Carolyn shouldn't have done that" or "Carolyn should have spoken up when...", great, go ahead, it would be a huge advance for politics on the South Shore.
Given the lack of response to the substantive policy issues including even Vickie Conrad's bus plan, total lack of acknowledgement of the reasons for the Liberal surge or McNeil's success in the debates, habit of engaging in more attack ad posturing, it should be fairly obvious why the NDP will not be returning more than one member to the legislature from the South Shore. It may well be Gary Ramey, but if so, he certainly would not be helped by clowns such as yourself degrading commentators and accusing them of fear or being worthless or engaged in "vitriol".
One wonders similarly about the people answering questions on Ramey's facebook page who certainly are not keeping up to the standard one would expect of a PhD - some of what they write is barely coherent drivel and calling it "propaganda" would be an insult to propaganda. The only groups Gary's campaign has joined on facebook are to twin the 103 highway, which is just another way to empty out the region and turn it into a commuter shed for Halifax. Local people get removed from his facebook friends list for asking reasonable questions.
If Gary wins it will be despite of, not because of, his stupid promoters and campaigners, present company included, sad to say.
Now grow up and read something other than an attack ad and internal smear sheet.
The only person who is discrediting Gary here is you.
I was the one who recruited Vicki Conrad to be the Queens NDP candidate in the 2003 election, and after coming just 421 votes short that time, I was one of a dedicated crew that worked hard in-between the 2003 and the 2006 elections. Even though the Liberals were so incompetant prior to the 2003 election their (parachute) candidate forgot to sign his nomination papers, and was ruled ineligible to run, I believe Vicki would have won in 2006, even with a Liberal on the ballot. (In case you didn't know, more people voted in Queens in 2006 WITHOUT the Liberal on the ballot than did in 2003 with one!)
Now that I've moved to Lunenburg, I've felt the same 'vibe' here that I felt in Queens in 2006.
Peter Zwicker may be well known in the Lunenburg area, but not nearly as much outside of it. And a lot of people voted for Michael Baker, the person, not necessarily because he was P.C.
I think the result is going to be the same, a history-making NDP victory.
Stay tuned!
Can we not call other babblers "stupid promoters and campaigners" please? That would be fabulous. You don't need to personally attack other babblers to make your point.
I see the 'Musical Chair Party' A.K.A. The Greens have their full slate of 'names on the ballot'.
Let's see who's back again, but in a different riding:
2006 2009
Chris Milburn Cape Breton Nova Cape Breton North
Rebecca Mosher Halifax-Atlantic Antigonish
Margaret Whitney Queens Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley
Stuart Simpson Lunenburg Queens
Michael Milburn Cape Breton West Cape Breton North
Leona MacLeod Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley Halifax-Chebucto
Danny Melvin Dartmouth South-Portland Valley Cumberland South
Chris Alders Kings North Cape Breton Centre
Brendan MacNeil Lunenburg West Kings South
I hope these candidates like whatever tune they are playing Musical Chairs to, (Kermit The Frog's 'I'm Glad To Be Green'?), because they won't be coming close to winning any 'seats'.
Why would they change seats to run in? It seems very weird, name recognition alone plays a factor in getting votes. No actually it doesn't come to think of it. Paper candidates can be put anywhere, and of course the Green Party is not about actually getting elected, just about playing the spoiler.
Some of those people are actually on their 3rd election and third different seat- because they fill in wherever they can't get anybody else to lend their name for the ballot.
Chris Alders for example is the provincial organizer and has no connection to Cape Breton [Valley boy].
So out in Nova Scotia too, the Green Party and its members are all about filling their pockets, as opposed to being actually about something!
Thats not the only thing, or the most likely, that protecting a subsidy suggests.
Ah, but they bring VISION to the campaign. No budget, no actual priorities, but loads of vision - http://thechronicleherald.ca/Election/1123458.html
The cynicism is staggering. I have no problem with small parties - I was an NDP activist back when Alexa McDonough was our sole sitting member. And every party has places where there's going to be a name on the ballot. But now that public funding is in place, and you get your $$$ per vote, there's a huge incentive for fringe parties to run names on ballots to pump up their revenues.
KenS, re the topic you mentioned, here are the details:
Climate Change and our Energy Choices When: Tue., May 26, 7 p.m.Price: free Hear candidates debate renewable energy, Nova Scotia's dependence on coal, energy efficiency and their visions for our energy future. Sponsored by the EAC and the Dalhousie College of Sustainability. In Theatre A.
and thx for all the info Dave. Here I thought going postal in Canada was voting NDP, lol I hope Vicki wins again - and Lunenbrg sounds VERY interesting. I think ppl genuinely liked Mr. Baker and his wife who as a nurse worked with so many ppl, but it is different with him gone now. (Sad to see anyone die that way whoever they vote for) I just want the riding to go NDP- this IS the riding you mean?
Yes, JaneyCancuk, I do mean Lunenburg.
I was in Queens on Friday, and Lunenburg West on Saturday, and the same thing was happening there. Both NDP candidates started off the campaign with 500 signs each, and both have had to order more with more than 2 weeks left in the campaign because so many people were asking for signs; many for the first-time ever!
Stay tuned!
Then tell them not to project their own legitimate fears of their own inadequacy ("someone is very, very scared") onto commentators who can back up what they say. If you want someone never to be called stupid, tell them not to tell other people about their own inner experience or motivations. Someone who pretends to this kind of insight or telepathy can legitimate be called abusive, stupid, ignorant, manipulative, hypocritical, and so on. It's not personal. It's fine to doubt my conclusions but don't tell me the opinion is worthless, based on nothing, or based on fear, and don't tell me not to call someone stupid if they pretend to such magical powers.
Speaking of hypocrisy, NDP supporters in general have no right to criticize vote-splitting by Greens. In dozens of elections both provincial and federal since the 1950s, NDP candidates with no chance to win have ensured wins for Conservatives. This is something the NDP has done far more of than the Greens, historically. In the 2008 federal election, as every Nova Scotian knows, the NDP campaigned heavily to defeat Elizabeth May and refused deals that would have given it a nearly certain shot in South Shore or some other riding(s) in exchange. There was never any question that May would run at least second, but, NDP supporters including former candidate Alexis MacDonald and then candidate Lorraine L'Orefice simply made up an imagined second-place poll position, and convinced many thousands of people to split their votes and re-elect MacKay. How is this different from what the GPNS is doing? GPC has grown up under May, the NDP and provincial GPNS should grow up too. Everyone who participates in these deliberate vote-splitting campaigns is at best sabotaging their own values and electing Conservatives like MacKay or Keddy, it would be more charitable to call them simply stupid.
As for the NS policy of paying huge subsidies to "full slate" parties only, it should be challenged in the Supreme Court. Federally the 2% threshold for federal funding was thrown out, and any "full slate" requirement would be clearly prejudicial against regionally based parties (like the Bloc). Should it be impossible to start a Cape Breton party, or a First Nations party, or a rural or urban party, that runs only in some of the ridings? That's a hell of a case to try to make in a democracy. I give the NS funding policy two years.
It's not hard to see the toxic negative influence of per-vote financing on the federal parties. First all the anti-Harper parties refuse to co-operate before the election, each fearing that strategic voting will cost it cash, unable to challenge their own fulltime insiders whose salaries are secured by those subsidies. They keep refusing to deal after election night, weakening their coalition potential, especially that of the only man who could have led it legitimately, Dion (51% of Canadians voted for him or federalist party that said it had no serious objection to working with him, i.e. GPC, NDP). Only once Harper announces cuts to per-vote funding do party staff insiders in the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens get so terrified they'll lose their jobs that the political leaderships can actually cut a deal.
The second Harper backs off and ceases to threaten pulling the per-vote subsidy, however, the coalition dynamics change and party fulltime staff take over again, each pushing their own selfish interests in petty competition with each other, and we lose the coalition.
The combination of first past the post voting and per-vote subsidies and fulltime staff in left wing parties (who seem to think they have a right to their power and influence) could keep the Conservatives in power provincially in NS and federally - for a long time.
What's needed in both the NDP and the Greens is a systematic elimination of every official and candidate who opposes vote-swaps and seat deals. These reciprocal arrangements, unlike "strategic voting" calls in the mass media, don't reduce the overall vote for these parties, they just efficiently redistribute the votes so that the progressive parties end up with the balance of power instead of whining rights.
Wow.
I'm beginning to think that Marritimarr has a little too much time on his hands.
Either that, or he's a P.C. supporter who sees the writing on the wall about the up-coming demise of the Nova Scotia Conservative
Party in the June 9th election and he's venting his frustrations ahead of time.
If it's the latter, bring on the election!
Stay tuned!
Ken, you forgot the "giant warty toads through very small straws" part, right after "NDP sucks."
I never realized I had such deep-seated fears of my own inadequacy. Did you?
Hey, this is starting to get the same feel as the discussions of the BC election campaign. Can we describe this sort of discourse as going coastal?
Coastal, as long as it is NOT postal!
Here is more info on the eco debate at Dal for those interested
The event is co-sponsored by Dal's College of Sustainability and the Ecology Action Centre.
Candidates slated to take part in the debate are Brendan MacNeill (Green), Jane Spurr (Liberal),
David Morse (Conservative) and Howard Epstein (NDP). The moderator will be Silver Donald Cameron.
Personally, I think Howard (who used to be involved with the EA Centre) will win this hands down
- the NDP always come out ahwad of the Green party on env issues but then again, I am biased. It shd
be interesting however to hear what the Libs and Tories have to say.
I guess KenS this individual likes paper in name only green candidates.
For those away from the Blessed Coast- in that panel David Morse is the Enviro Minister. I hope Howard doesn't stand in the way of Morse making a fool of himself.
Howard is a treat to watch for those who haven't seen him in a situation like this. Very knowledgable and persuasive, never bombastic. Deliberate.
[Mind you, we don't see much of bombastic in Nova Scotia anyway.]
Hey folks, does anyone know of any high-quality blogs, alternative or independent media following this election?
Which is worse, telling other people what their motives and feelings and political inclinations are, or just making snide remarks that demonstrate disinterest in the actual issues and constituents? The NDP is not breaking through on South Shore because it does not listen and does not put its own candidates' ideas up front, instead subordinating them to some marketing analysis done in Halifax.
Rather than psychoanalyze your critics and sneering at them, you might consider actually responding to the real issues that they raise.
You won't get anywhere in politics by disregarding people critical of you. Quite the opposite. Anyone intelligent reading the above would realize that it actually handed a lot more useful advice to the NDP than it did to the other parties about how to win in South Shore. Too bad that the NDP motto is "groupthink good, non-NDP bad" (don't ask, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/groupthink ).
Since you seem so interested in what I really think of the NDP, I'll tell you. Like any objective observer, it's not all positive or negative.
The NDP has plenty of talent coast to coast. Many good community activists join the NDP and do great constituency work. It's just sad how they get treated by their own leadership - that good sincere policy people like Bill Blaikie and Alexa McDonough and Pat Martin and Howard Epstein get shoved off into ineffective support positions while hypocrites like Layton and Dexter and James take over and run campaigns that just don't listen to anyone, pander to dirty old industries, have no vision of the future, and are run by the same people every time.
"The NDP always come out ahwad of the Green party on env issues"?!?! Well at least you admit you're biased, but how exactly is dropping the HST on coal power and not funding a bus plan that the Tories (Zwicker, Bolivar-Getson) favour, that an NDP incumbent (Conrad) wants to push even harder, and twinning highways to encourage commuting instead of rolling out broadband to speed up telework, while doing nothing about car insurance (*the* issue in the last election), add up to "greener than the Greens"? The NDP is the *least* environmental party in this election, and that's not a biased view, it's obvious. But the differences between the three parties, or even these and the Green Party of NS, are minimal compared to the differences federally or elsewhere in the country, so who cares? This isn't Ottawa, none of the three major NS parties is really anti-environment: MacDonald has a conservation-first energy policy and e-waste fees and sewage cleanup to his credit, McNeil is the only credible leader on the power grid issues, and Dexter would probably have to listen to Epstein and compromise by leaving HST on coal power in a minority government. If the NDP loses votes to the Greens or Liberals, it's all their own fault. MacDonald scored a very sticky point on Dexter today by saying removing HST from electricity was a subsidy to people heating swimming pools, since MacDonald spent that HST money on genuinely needy people.
But this isn't about the policy itself, it's about the NDP abandoning its base and its values in this election - sad to see. They've descended into a mud-pit with the PCs, running an attack-ad-focused campaign. How can you say, by the way, that I must be a PC supporter when I am more critical of the PC campaign than the NDP's? The same way the NDP can say "take the bus" is an insult but never mention real buses! Because, according to Dexter, everyone who *does* take or want to take a bus is a loser? Because Dexter only cares about drivers? Don't you think a senior who can no longer drive is going to stick with the PCs, given that attitude?
The good old CCF actually stood for something under Tommy Douglas: Helpless people, poor people, seniors, veterans, youth in need of opportunity. They would not have left it up to Carolyn Bolivar-Getson and Jerry Zwicker, both of whom have stood firmly in favour of the rural bus plan for the South Shore and who have done everything in their power to facilitate the feasibility study for it and the funding for it ($3M earmarked by PCs, $10M by Liberals, unclear if any commitment at all has been made by the NDP yet).
Howard Epstein is certainly more qualified on any environment or energy or transport issue than Dexter and hopefully after this last dopey campaign Dexter will be gone, and Epstein in. It is a lot like the BC election where the NDP-BC (unlike all other parties in this country the NDP forces federal and provincial memberships together) ran their campaign against Campbell's carbon tax and thus alienated Greens and swing voters who didn't feel like subsidizing fuel wasters - losing to a third majority by Campbell. Dexter may well repeat that experience.
Dexter has two weeks and one debate to get a majority by listening instead of pandering to entrenched interests. If he gets a minority, McNeil or MacDonald will be rewriting his policy book anyway, and next election the NDP will be back in third place - the best you can get if you never listen to anyone outside Halifax. This used to be the Liberals' problem, now it's the PC's problem, next time it'll be the NDP's problem.
Don't say you weren't warned. The NDP-NS could have had a majority government in this campaign, if it had only learned to listen, and hadn't betrayed its values and core supporters, leaving plenty of room for McNeil, other Liberals, the Greens, to eat their lunch.