http://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/nsvotes2017/
So far, Lib 17; PC 15; NDP 7. Gary Burrill is trailing in his riding.
2017 Nova Scotia Election
Tue, 2017-05-30 19:38
#52
Tue, 2017-05-30 20:15
#53
Looks like a Liberal government although not at all clear if they will end up with a majority. They seem to be stuck around 24-25. The Tories have a slight edge in the popular vote and have done very well in Cape Breton and the rural mainland, but seem to have settled at 18 seats. The NDP keeps flipping between 7-9 seats. Burrill slightly up in Chebucto ATM, but otherwise the Liberals are doing well in HRM which is what will keep them in office, it would appear.
Tue, 2017-05-30 20:33
#54
http://globalnews.ca/news/3485879/live-nova-scotia-election-2017-real-ti...
At the moment I posted this, the results were
NDP 8(elected in 1, leading in 7)
PC 17 (elected in 13, leading in 4)
Liberal 26 (elected in 10, leading in 16)
dead heat between Liberals and PC's in popular vote
So at this point, a knife-edge Liberal majority which could slide down to minority status)
Tue, 2017-05-30 20:36
#55
CBC projects a Liberal government.
Tue, 2017-05-30 20:58
#56
Seat count is doing ok with splits. Eight so far. One more than 2013. Down five points in popular vote.
Tue, 2017-05-30 21:15
#57
CBC reports Burrill elected. NDP leading or elected in 9 seats.
Tue, 2017-05-30 21:43
#58
Burrill giving a speech. http://www.cbc.ca/listen/live/radio1/halifax
Tue, 2017-05-30 22:42
#59
Where is Alexa McDonough tonight?
Tue, 2017-05-30 23:44
#60
Where is Alexa McDonough tonight?
Retired.
Wed, 2017-05-31 01:16
#61
Looks to be the same number of seats as 2013 and a drop of a little over 5% in the vote.
We lost Denise Peterson-Rafuse. Gained two Dartmouth seats with Claudia Chender (actually replaced NDP incumbent) and Sue LeBlanc. One Cape Breton seat with Tammy Martin. Lost Queens-Shelburne as well.
Burrill won his seat.
We took a shit kicking in many of our old seats in the suburbs and rural NS. Tons of rebuilding that still needs to happen to get back to winning government.
Wed, 2017-05-31 00:26
#62
So, it's 7 seats and about 21% of the vote. And we were lucky to manage those 7 seats with that amount of the vote.
Wed, 2017-05-31 01:15
#63
The suburbs did not find our platform or leader appealing it seems. Neither did rural NS besides Truro with Zann who won due to being Zann.
Sackville-Beaverbank we got 20%. Down from 37%. Cole Harbour-Eastern Passage we got 24%. Down from 39%. Kings South we got 21%. Down from 36%. Others on the list.
Thank god we elected three new dynamic women with Martin, Chender (hold of seat), and LeBlanc.
We almost won two other seats. One in CB that we won in 2013. And of course NDP incumbent Denise Peterson-Rafuse in Chester-St. Margarets.
Feel The Burrill!
Wed, 2017-05-31 01:20
#64
We took a shit kicking in many of our old seats in the suburbs and rural NS. Tons of rebuilding that still needs to happen to get back to winning government.
It looked to me like it was the advance polls that put the Liberals over the top, which suggests that the Liberals lost support in the final stretch of the campaign. Does that suggest that the Opposition needed to do a better job of knocking out the foundation upon which the Liberals stood before the election? Did the early call catch the Opposition off guard?
Wed, 2017-05-31 01:58
#65
It did in some seats. That may be due to better organizing for the advance polls. The reality too is the it seemed the NDP dipped in the last week. We were hovering around 25%. We ended up with 21.5%. It seems some of that went PC who ran on a Red Tory, progressive type platform. And many New Democrat voters didn't feel comfortable with the Burrill platform and voted for the Baillie PCs. Different factors led to this result.
It's not a good night for the NDP here. But it could have been far worse with 21.5%.
Wed, 2017-05-31 02:07
#66
Wed, 2017-05-31 02:54
#67
The suburbs did not find our platform or leader appealing it seems. Neither did rural NS besides Truro with Zann who won due to being Zann.
Sackville-Beaverbank we got 20%. Down from 37%. Cole Harbour-Eastern Passage we got 24%. Down from 39%. Kings South we got 21%. Down from 36%. Others on the list.
Thank god we elected three new dynamic women with Martin, Chender (hold of seat), and LeBlanc.
We almost won two other seats. One in CB that we won in 2013. And of course NDP incumbent Denise Peterson-Rafuse in Chester-St. Margarets.
Feel The Burrill!
Enough already with the "Feel the Burrill" thing. In an election like this, the NDP vote would have been squeezed down even with a Dexter-type leftbasher as leader.
Wed, 2017-05-31 13:09
#68
Where is Alexa McDonough tonight?
Retired.
And truth be told, her record as provincial and federal NDP leader was not exactly epic.
They lost every seat but hers in 1981 and throughout her era in provicial politics the NSNDP never had more than 3 seats at any one time. Her crowning achievement in federal politics was getting the NDP back to official party status with 21 seats in 1997, then lowerig them to 13 seats in 2001. I respect Alexa McDonough, but there's simply no reason to think she'd have done massively better than Burrilll did last night.
Wed, 2017-05-31 11:08
#69
Her crowning achievement in federal politics was getting the NDP back to official party status with 19 seats in 1997
It was actually 21 seats.
And truth be told, her record as provincial and federal NDP leader was not exactly epic.
She is the only women to lead a federal party to win official party status in an election. She did that not once, but twice.
Wed, 2017-05-31 13:10
#70
Her crowning achievement in federal politics was getting the NDP back to official party status with 19 seats in 1997
It was actually 21 seats.
And truth be told, her record as provincial and federal NDP leader was not exactly epic.
She is the only women to lead a federal party to win official party status in an election. She did that not once, but twice.
That said, she never managed that with the Nova Scotia NDP(I stand corrected on the federal seat count total), so it's kind of ridiculous to argue that a leader who won three seats(and led the party to a two seat loss her first go-round as leader)is somehow infinitely superior to someone who just led the same party to seven seats.
I suspect Burrill will probably go. But let's face it, whoever who led the NSNDP this year was always going to have about the same chance of achieving a comeback as Howard Hampton had of leading the Ontario NDP to anything close to victory or even Official Opposition status in 1999, or that anyone else would have had of achieving a resurgence there in the same election.
An "I hate those damn lefties just like YOU folks" type would have done exactly the same as Burrill.
Wed, 2017-05-31 14:24
#71
I suspect Burrill will probably go.
What's Megan Leslie up to these days?
Wed, 2017-05-31 15:17
#72
Her crowning achievement in federal politics was getting the NDP back to official party status with 19 seats in 1997
It was actually 21 seats.
And truth be told, her record as provincial and federal NDP leader was not exactly epic.
She is the only women to lead a federal party to win official party status in an election. She did that not once, but twice.
That said, she never managed that with the Nova Scotia NDP(I stand corrected on the federal seat count total), so it's kind of ridiculous to argue that a leader who won three seats(and led the party to a two seat loss her first go-round as leader)is somehow infinitely superior to someone who just led the same party to seven seats.
I suspect Burrill will probably go. But let's face it, whoever who led the NSNDP this year was always going to have about the same chance of achieving a comeback as Howard Hampton had of leading the Ontario NDP to anything close to victory or even Official Opposition status in 1999, or that anyone else would have had of achieving a resurgence there in the same election.
An "I hate those damn lefties just like YOU folks" type would have done exactly the same as Burrill.
Gary Doer was able to rebound one election after Howard Pawley. Poor far lefties like yourself just can't handle that the "Bernie Sanders of the North" did so poorly when he faced voters.
This was Burrill's election. No one elses.
You're wrong on another aspect. He won't go. He's having the time of his life. He now has a seat and will there for the next election. He surrounds himself with people like Howard Epstein who don't want to win but just shout from the sidelines. Thankfully though, Gary is open to the advice of sane people in the party. Takes awhile but at least he listens. He just wanted to talk about groceries and not healthcare. Finally talked into talking healthcare. Christ.
Feel The Burrill! Don't like it? Talk to Burrill's people who came up with it.
Thu, 2017-06-01 16:52
#73
I have to confess I'm not up on my Nova Scotia politics, but what exactly is it about Gary Burrill that makes him "far left"? I appreciate he may be to the left of Darrell Dexter but I'm not sure I understand the basis of the criticism. The NSNDP won the same number of seats as 2013 (and missed two more by a handful of votes), and elected the leader (which they didn't do last time). The popular vote sagged but 21% is nothing to sneeze at. Alexa never managed to exceed 15% and the NSNDP only started scoring in the high 20s/low 30s within the last 20 years or so. And for every Gary Doer or Carole James-esque comeback after a big defeat, there's a Howard Hampton or a Dwain Lingenfelter.
Seems to me that the PCs had to move left to improve their standing - would an NSNDP fighting over the same middle ground have done much better?
Not wanting to start any flame wars, I'm just genuinely interested in the discussion.
Thu, 2017-06-01 18:02
#74
Her crowning achievement in federal politics was getting the NDP back to official party status with 19 seats in 1997
It was actually 21 seats.
And truth be told, her record as provincial and federal NDP leader was not exactly epic.
She is the only women to lead a federal party to win official party status in an election. She did that not once, but twice.
That said, she never managed that with the Nova Scotia NDP(I stand corrected on the federal seat count total), so it's kind of ridiculous to argue that a leader who won three seats(and led the party to a two seat loss her first go-round as leader)is somehow infinitely superior to someone who just led the same party to seven seats.
I suspect Burrill will probably go. But let's face it, whoever who led the NSNDP this year was always going to have about the same chance of achieving a comeback as Howard Hampton had of leading the Ontario NDP to anything close to victory or even Official Opposition status in 1999, or that anyone else would have had of achieving a resurgence there in the same election.
An "I hate those damn lefties just like YOU folks" type would have done exactly the same as Burrill.
Gary Doer was able to rebound one election after Howard Pawley. Poor far lefties like yourself just can't handle that the "Bernie Sanders of the North" did so poorly when he faced voters.
This was Burrill's election. No one elses.
You're wrong on another aspect. He won't go. He's having the time of his life. He now has a seat and will there for the next election. He surrounds himself with people like Howard Epstein who don't want to win but just shout from the sidelines. Thankfully though, Gary is open to the advice of sane people in the party. Takes awhile but at least he listens. He just wanted to talk about groceries and not healthcare. Finally talked into talking healthcare. Christ.
Feel The Burrill! Don't like it? Talk to Burrill's people who came up with it.
OK...so, rather than choosing Burrill(btw, Gary Doer actually LED the NDP to that third-place finish, and made it a better finish than anyone would have expected-brought the party back from 6% in the polls to 21% in about three weeks), what would you have had the NSNDP do? Stay the course? Choose someone who'd have been exactly like Dexter? Run to the right of Dexter? What approach would you have advocated that would have been magically superior?
And which other possible leadership candidate, in your opinion, would have been inherently superior? I'm not from Nova Scotia, so I don't have all the information you have.
Dexter won an election the NSNDP would likely have won under any leader. He fell to third place and lost his own seat after spending four years treating the people whose support he needed to be re-elected like the enemy, like dirt. And after spending that entire term never even mentioning the good things the party HAD done in power. Why, rather than seething at the left, do you not assign Dexter any responsibility in that outcome?
Oh, and I'm not "far left". I'm not a Trotskyist or a Maoist of a wanne-be Khmer Rouge type. I just think human needs should matter at least as much as the abstraction of a balanced budget and that a left-of-center government should never distance itself from its own supporters once in power. How is any of THAT "far left"?
Dexter could have created a long-term realignment in NS. All he had to do was treat the NDP base as allies rather than a nuisance and a scourge.
Thu, 2017-06-01 23:14
#75
I've heard from some who live there that when Burrill announced the plan to intentionally run a deficit that his polling went down. Don't know if that's true, but that's what they reported to me. Anyway, it is too bad that the Liberals squeaked by with a majority. I think a coalition between the Tories and the NDP (or an accord, or just the Tories running the show relying on support from wherever) would have been an improvement.
Fri, 2017-06-02 20:12
#76
I spoke to a former MLA who said there was a lot of noise over the deficits and platform on the doorsteps. Probably a factor. We lurched left and our support went down. Plain and simple. Hard for people like Ken Burch to accept. We're told move left and a mass of voters will come our way...
Dexter didn't treat anyone like "dirt"... what utter BS. He made some decisions the lefties in his caucus like Howard Epstein and Gary Burrill didn't like and they made his life difficult. Funny though that Burrill all of a sudden discovered all the good things the Dexter government was doing on the health file during the election. Healthcare has gone to shit since the NDP lost. One doctor says the system is a catastrophe. It's as if Gary was shocked what Dexter was doing. Too bad he fight against it all at the time.
BTW, Doer became leader in 1988 DURING the election after the Pawley government fell. That result wasn't Doer's. No one blamed him. But in two years... two years... he won back many traditional NDP seats to go from 12 seats to 20 seats. Two years. So you're Bob Rae explanation doesn't wash.
We had a horrible night on Tuesday. You can spin it all you want but that was Burrill. Nice enough guy. Not premier material though. And the team around him lives in la la land.
Fri, 2017-06-02 20:55
#77
Always nice when a member of a party on the left starts attacking "lefties."
Fri, 2017-06-02 23:35
#78
duplicate post
Fri, 2017-06-02 23:34
#79
BTW, Doer became leader in 1988 DURING the election after the Pawley government fell. That result wasn't Doer's. No one blamed him. But in two years... two years... he won back many traditional NDP seats to go from 12 seats to 20 seats. Two years. So you're Bob Rae explanation doesn't wash.
That's the view in hindsight, however the Liberals actually went into that campaign with a realistic shot of winning. Unfortunately they faltered and the NDP was able to pick up the pieces.
As for Doer having better success 2 years after a crushing defeat than Burrill had after 4? That's because the NDP was the third party in a minority government. Third parties matter and get attention in minority parliaments, unlike the majority under which MacNeil operated. If the PCs had been able to cut the Liberals down to minority on Tuesday, even if the NDP actually lost ground from 2013, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I can also assure you that Doer was very instrumental in the disastrous result the NDP experienced last year. Under his watch, the grassroots of the party atrophied, and it became all about him, so much so that we lost the capacity to function without a party when he left. The levels of poverty that persisted in this province under his watch were unacceptable, and the government's response to handling children in government care was blatantly incompetent. So much so that the PCs actually attacked the NDP on those issues in the dying days of the campaign. This alienated some traditional NDPers to the point that I know people who ran as NDP candidates in 1988 who are now active Green party supporters. If you lose people who stuck with you at your party's historical levels of support, something is wrong.
You'll respond by saying that the loss didn't happen under Doer's watch. That's because when the financial crisis hit in 2008, he had the good sense to leave and protect his legacy. The province's finances collapsed, and any Premier in those circumstances would have lost popularity from making tough decisions that would have alienated people. Brad Wall is finding that out the hard way right now. And who did the NDP tap to replace Doer? His right-hand man in finance, Greg Selinger, who played a key role in gutting the financial capacity of the province and cost the province far more revenue than what the PST hike brought in. Getting back to what I said about the cult of leadership above, it was so entrenched in the NDP when Selinger raised the PST that there was no practical way of anyone in the NDP (many of whom found out just hours before he announced it publicly) to challenge that decision, and so the party willingly folloed him off a cliff.
And looking at the proportion of seats, Burrill seems to have done better this go around than Hampton did in 1999.
Tue, 2017-06-06 13:34
#80
Doer's fault even though the NDP won another majority government after Doer? Priceless.
Tue, 2017-06-06 13:35
#81
Always nice when a member of a party on the left starts attacking "lefties."
Only the kind the gives the rest of us a bad name.
Wed, 2017-06-07 01:07
#82
Doer's fault even though the NDP won another majority government after Doer? Priceless.
Yup. I remember being involved with the NDP under Doer, and the prevailing attitude towards the grassroots was "we need you to cheer on Our Glorious Leader, and give lots of donations and free labour at elections, otherwise keep your mouth shut." You conveniently forgot that in the last election, the NDP reached historic lows, Nixonian levels of support, and lost many traditionally safe NDP seats.
Funny you haven't addressed the rest of the argument I made.
Fri, 2017-06-09 23:02
#83
What you don't seem to understand is that committing to a perpetually balanced budget means committing to doing nothing left of center or even remotely egalitarian. It can only mean permanent austerity and perpetual cuts in social services.
Always nice when a member of a party on the left starts attacking "lefties."
Only the kind the gives the rest of us a bad name.
Define "the rest of us". You seem to expect everyone else here to see you as the voice of the NS NDP "silent majority". Why, might I ask, are you entitled to that perception?
Fri, 2017-06-09 15:05
#84
Doer's fault even though the NDP won another majority government after Doer? Priceless.Yup. I remember being involved with the NDP under Doer, and the prevailing attitude towards the grassroots was "we need you to cheer on Our Glorious Leader, and give lots of donations and free labour at elections, otherwise keep your mouth shut." You conveniently forgot that in the last election, the NDP reached historic lows, Nixonian levels of support, and lost many traditionally safe NDP seats.
Funny you haven't addressed the rest of the argument I made.
Since I proved your main point inaccurate? Lots of reasons the NDP lost the last election in Manitoba. Gary Doer wasn't one of them.
Fri, 2017-06-09 21:09
#85
Since I proved your main point inaccurate?
What is inaccurate about mentioning that Doer was the third party in a minority situation, Burrill was a third party in a majority, thereby it's not an apples-to-apples comparison?
Tue, 2017-06-13 15:32
#86
I spoke to a former MLA who said there was a lot of noise over the deficits and platform on the doorsteps. Probably a factor. We lurched left and our support went down. erial though. And the team around him lives in la la land.
And yet in last year's federal election Nova Scotians voted overwhelmingly for the federal Liberals largely because they LOVED Justic Trudeau's promise to run large deficits each and every year for the foreseeable future while the NDP was stuck boring everyne to tears with Mulcair being a 1990s style technocrat promising balanced budgets and no new taxes and a few vague progressive promises that wouldnt benefit anyone for 8-10 years.
I wish the NDP in Nova Scotia had done better, but I think they would have done much much worse if they had gone back to the well with "balanced budget balanced budget, we are boring we are boring, did we tell you we can balance the budget, no new taxes (oops we raised the HST 2%), no new programs, no new taxes, no deficits, we are boring we are boring, now vote for us" shtick.
Wed, 2017-06-14 20:49
#87
Slight difference - Zoolander tied his deficits to infrastructure and economic growth. Voters got that. Burrill didn't. He tied it to "social spending". Voters didn't get that. You're also dealing with different levels of government and voters clearly understand it's easier for a country to run a deficit than a small province. Also, I don't recall Burrill talking about jobs or economic growth at all. He originally wanted to only speak about groceries until finally he listened to people around him and started talking about healthcare. It was a struggle. And he finally discovered the good work the Dexter government did on the file. Too bad he and others worked against Dexter from the inside and allowed Liberals to win. Now, our healthcare system is in chaos.
All that boring stuff you list was essentially a big part of the Progressive Conservative campaign. They went up over nine points from 2013. It seemed to resonate far more than Burrill's message especially since a large segment of NDP vote went PC.