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Taken from the World Socialist Web Site of the International Committee
of the Fourth International at:  http://www.wsws.org

Tories oust Liberals in Nova Scotia election

Another debacle for Canada's social democrats

By our correspondent
29 July 1999

After six years in opposition, the Tories have been returned to power in

Nova Scotia, the largest of Canada's four Atlantic provinces.

In Tuesday's provincial election, the Tories won 29 of the 52 seats and
39.2 percent of the popular vote. The Liberals, who had been reduced to
a minority government in the March 1998 election, fell to third place in

terms of both seats and popular vote, meaning the New Democratic
Party (NDP) will form the official Opposition.

There was no jubilation among social democrats, however. Just sixteen
months ago the NDP, a perennial also-ran in Nova Scotia politics,
captured 19 seats and fell less than a percentage point short of leading

the province in the popular vote. On Tuesday, the NDP won only 12
seats and saw its share of the popular vote shrink by almost 5 percent,
to
29.9 percent.

The Tory election campaign combined an appeal to popular resentment
over the declining state of public health care and education with
right-wing demagogy. Tory leader and Premier-elect John Hamm
claimed an NDP government would be beholden to the unions and
sought to exploit regional divisions, blaming hospital closures in
Halifax
on government support for a failing steel mill in Cape Breton.

Even the press has exuded skepticism over the Tories' ability to
implement their 243 election promises, noting that their pledges to
raise
social spending, slash taxes and balance the provincial budget are
contradictory. The new Tory government will quickly jettison those
promises that don't accord with the interests of big business, while
insisting it has a popular mandate for closing the Crown-owned Sysco
steel mill and for slashing public services so as to satisfy Nova
Scotia's
creditors and finance tax cuts for the well-to-do.

National significance

The Nova Scotia elections are of national significance for three
reasons.

First, they underscore that in the 1990s political allegiances have
largely
broken down. With all the traditional parties having moved sharply to
the
right and adopted similar pro-business programs, public interest and
engagement in official politics is declining. Support shifts quickly
from one
political formation to another as the electorate pragmatically searches
for
a party responsive to its social concerns, or one that at least appears
to
represent change.

The Tory victory in Nova Scotia is the second time in two months that
the Tories have entered an election campaign trailing badly in the polls

only to emerge victorious on polling day. Led by a new, 33-year-old
leader, the Tories recently won 44 of New Brunswick's 55 seats, ousting
that province's 12 year-old Liberal government.

Secondly, the defeat of the Liberals in Nova Scotia is a major blow to
the six year-old federal Liberal government. In Canada, the defeat of a
national government is traditionally preceded by the defeat of
provincial
governments of the same political stripe.

When the Tories were ousted from national office in 1993, there were
only two sitting Tory provincial governments. Following Tuesday's
election only one of Canada's ten provinces, Newfoundland, has a
Liberal government. In 1993, there were five. While among working
people the Liberals are increasingly identified with social spending
cuts,
large sections of the corporate elite and upper middle class, envious of

their US counterparts' swelling fortunes, have become apoplectic over
the Liberals' failure to aggressively slash taxes and launch a new round
of
privatization and deregulation.

Finally, the Nova Scotia elections are of significance because they
represent a further stunning blow to the trade union-based NDP. At the
beginning of the decade, under the impact of Canada's worst economic
slump since the Great Depression, the NDP came to power in three
provinces�Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan�representing
more than half of Canada's population. Since then, support for the NDP
has plummeted, as the social democrats have come into open conflict
with the working class. NDP governments have imposed sweeping social
spending cuts and onerous tax increases, attacked trade union rights,
and
victimized welfare recipients.

The NDP was swept from office in Ontario in June 1995. Then, in a
further election last month, it failed to win enough seats to maintain
official
party status in the provincial legislature, although Canada's most
populous
province has been convulsed by massive struggles against cuts to public
and social services. Saskatchewan's NDP government recently
postponed elections until the fall, after using emergency legislation
and the
courts to break a nurses' strike. Earlier this month, the British
Columbia
NDP government was rocked by several cabinet resignations triggered
by disputes in the party's top brass over how to respond to big
business's
demand that the NDP move still further right. For his part, NDP Premier
Glen Clark has made a former leader of the provincial Liberal Party
effectively the number two man in his government, naming him to a series

of important posts, including the Finance Ministry.

The NDP leadership looked to the elections in Nova Scotia, the home
province of federal party leader Alexa McDonough, as a means of
reversing the tide of party woes�not only by capturing office, but by
using Nova Scotia to showcase a new breed of �pro-business� social
democrats. McDonough and her entourage intend to use next month's
national NDP conference to press for the jettisoning of what remains of
the NDP's traditional reformist program and its remodeling along the
lines
of the New Labour Party of Britain's Tony Blair. A victory in Nova
Scotia, or so McDonough and her advisors hoped, would serve to quiet
rank-and-file discontent over the NDP's new rightward turn.

The NDP made spectacular electoral gains in Nova Scotia in both the
1997 federal election and the 1998 provincial elections by appealing to
popular opposition to the federal Liberals' cuts to Unemployment
Insurance and the cuts which both levels of government have made to
health care and education. But with the NDP apparently poised to take
power�opinion polls at the beginning of the campaign showed it in first
place�the party leadership ordered a change in strategy so as to dispel
misgivings in business circles over an NDP victory.

Nova Scotia NDP leader Robert Chisholm began the election campaign
by denouncing the provincial Liberals for proposing to borrow $600
million over the next three years so as to reinvest in public health
care.
Nova Scotia, he affirmed, could not afford to add to its $9 billion
provincial debt. Attacked by the Tories for being pro-union, Chisholm
vowed that an NDP government would not threaten the interests of
corporate giants like Michelin Tires. So right wing was the NDP
campaign, The Globe and Mail dubbed the NDP the party of �fiscal
responsibility.�

After Tuesday's electoral debacle, the NDP leadership has scoffed at
suggestions the party's right-wing campaign opened the door for the
Tories to return to power, thus underscoring its determination to
reposition the party as �business friendly.� According to a national
party
worker, Nova Scotians �weren't ready for an NDP government.�

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