The 2019 federal election in Newfoundland and Labrador
is the tale of one of the most uncompetitive elections in recent memory.
The advance poll numbers make the point.
Newfoundland
and Labrador
|
Number of Electors
|
Electors
|
Percent
|
Avalon
|
7,024
|
86494
|
08
|
Bonavista–Burin–Trinity
|
3,185
|
74116
|
04
|
Coast of Bays–Central–Notre Dame
|
4,317
|
77680
|
5.5
|
Labrador
|
1,348
|
27197
|
05
|
Long Range Mountains
|
4,473
|
86553
|
05
|
St. John's East
|
9,187
|
85697
|
11
|
St. John's South–Mount Pearl
|
6,700
|
81979
|
08
|
Nationally, turn-out in the advance polls set a
record. That continued a
trend over the past two elections that saw an increase in the number voters
casting ballots earlier than the official polling day. Not so
in Newfoundland and Labrador. Elections Canada provided more opportunities to
vote in advance so that could have produced higher turn-out across the
province. But it didn’t.
All but one of the races in Newfoundland and Labrador saw
fewer than 10% of eligible voters turn out in the advance polls. The one race presumed to be highly
competitive – St. John’s East – saw a turn-out of 11%, which is the same
advance poll turn-out in that same
riding in 2015. In
other ridings in the province, the turn-out was the same or lower than 2015.
St. John’s East may return Jack Harris as the member
of parliament after rejecting him in 2015.
They may not. The race is close
but whether or not they return Harris to Ottawa, the real story in that riding
is that the provincial New Democrats could not find another candidate except
this 32-year veteran of provincial and federal politics. There was no competition for the
nomination.
Nor was there a competition for the NDP nomination in
any of the other federal ridings. The
party only found candidates in some ridings after the election had started and
the ones they found were classic NDP name-on-ballot types. They were students and long-time party
activists. They won’t win.
That’s significant because less than a decade ago, the
party held two federal seats in Newfoundland and Labrador and five seats
provincially. Yet here the NDP is now
struggling to mount more than one decent campaign and with a candidate who is
decidedly worn at the edges from over-use.
Aside from the Liberals, every party in the current
federal election is running token campaigns with inexperienced candidates and
very little money. They will barely
register on the public consciousness on any level except for the controversies nationally.
The parties and the candidates are – in every sense of
the term – disconnected from the ridings and people in Newfoundland and
Labrador. The Mad Max Alliance has one candidate with any profile. Other candidates include a guy who lives in Halifax.
The Greens have only one candidate with any public profile. The candidate in the hotly contested St. John’s
East was not even campaigning full-time for the first period of the campaign.
In Avalon, the NDP candidate is a champion of electric
trains and Indigenous housing in a riding with a relatively small Indigenous population.
She has her personal issues to trumpet but is fundamentally at odds with the
party platform and, more interestingly, her colleague the former member of
parliament. In fact, she is diametrically opposed to the position on offshore
oil taken by Jack Harris.
The NDP campaign is at war with itself, in other
words, in addition to being disconnected from the province. Thus, the potential for any cross-over
benefit among the campaigns is effectively lost.
The Conservatives, the one party that should be in a
better position, are in fact as bad as the rest of the pipsqueak campaigns or much
worse. The party candidate in Avalon issued
a statement promoting economic growth in Alberta. This is not any ordinary gaffe. It reflects the extent to which the Conservative
Party in its current form is really just another regional party dominated by Alberta
and Saskatchewan interests and with a decidedly Alberta perspective on many
issues.
The major party on the right wasn’t always like
that. The old Progressive Conservative
Party was a centre-right coalition in much the same way the Liberals were a
coalition on the centre-left. Their
ability to compete and win national elections was based on their ability to
appeal to different populations in different parts of the country. Brian Mulroney was the last Conservative
prime minister who came to power based on a genuinely national coalition.
That coalition ended with the mis-named Untie the
Right Movement. It fractured in the
immediate aftermath of the Progressive Conservative defeat in 1993. The western right wing broke off and formed
the Reform Party with Preston Manning as its leader. The Quebec wing of the Mulroney became the
Bloc Quebecois. And the PC Party itself tottered
along until Manning and the Reform Party absorbed it and now control it.
The result is a regional party representing two
provinces in western Canada, with some limited appeal in Ontario and New
Brunswick. The NDP has shrunk from national pretensions
to being a party of British Columbia, with some potential in Ontario and Nova
Scotia. Jack Harris is the exception to
NDP political fortunes in Newfoundland and Labrador that proves the rule. The
Green Party poaches most of the ideological and geographic territory of the NDP
and is similarly constrained. The Mad
Max Alliance is nothing more than a preposterous ego exercise that could only
attract the enmity and time of another egotist of comparable and comparably
risible proportions.
The Liberal Party, by contrast, is competitive or
dominates in seven of 10 provinces and has experienced periods of success in
the other three. This does not mean that
the Liberal Party is doing very well. In
Newfoundland and Labrador, the lack of
competition for voter support means the party has grown bloated and lazy. The platform plank in favour of the Stunnel –
essential a Muskrat Falls-style boondoggle – shows the extent to which federal
politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador are unable to describe the province’s interests
at the national Canadian level.
That is the other element of this decline of politics
in Newfoundland and Labrador at the federal level. Since the parties have no meaningful connection
to the province or understanding of local issues and concerns, they tend to
pander to whatever is the provincial flavour of the moment. That is why the
five parties have almost identical “Newfoundland and Labrador” blocks in their
plank and have been this way since the early 2000s.
There are three notorious examples of this tendency. The first was the 2004 general election when
two provincial candidates sided with the provincial government in the demand
for a permanent, Equalization-type transfer to the province based on specious
and in some cases false arguments. The second was the loan guarantee for
Muskrat Falls. The third is the current
demand for a provincial bailout of the Muskrat Falls project.
This might be worthwhile if the provincial political
scene was healthy but it has been desperately sick for the past 15 years or
more. Today, it is highly dysfunctional.
And that combination – dysfunctional provincial
politics and a raft of regional parties in a fragmented federal political system - is what we have when the province faces unprecedented financial problems.
-srbp-