Wow. Just wow. There is going to be a historic change in politics here in my home province of Nova Scotia on Tuesday. My party, the New Democrats, are going to form the next government. And, as this poll suggests, it will be a majority. Both the Conservatives and the Liberals are coughing blood at this point; it comes down to a question of how much they can hold.
More over the flip...
If you've been following my diaries here and here, you'll know I'm the NDP candidate in Yarmouth. It seems like I couldn't have picked a better time to run.
This Angus Reid / CTV poll is in line with two other polls. The numbers just keep going up for the NDP, in spite of Conservative attack ads, which might actually be backfiring. We're a bit old-fashioned about our politics here in NS.
How historic will an NDP victory be? Consider this. There are six of what I'd call the "old democracies" in Canada. These are the colonies (later provinces) that had responsible government before Confederation in 1867.
Let's take Quebec out of the mix. Quebec has always had its own culture, including politics.
Of the five remaining (Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario), power has gone back and forth between the Liberals and the Conservatives for, literally, centuries. No other party has formed a government in any of these provinces.
Well, there was one exception. Bob Rae led an NDP government in Ontario in the early '90s. That was a fluke, and the fact that Bob Rae is currently a Liberal MP in Ottawa kinda tells the whole story.
All the rest of the NDP's success in Canada has been in the post-Confederation provinces and territories (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Yukon) where the historical roots don't go quite so deep.
Do I have a chance to be elected? Well, the response on the doorsteps has been very good, but that's not much to go on. All I can do is to work as hard as I can in the next two days to bring it on home. But there is a coattails factor. Most folks know we will be the next government. Do they want to have an opposition backbencher, or a member of the new NDP government? Time will tell.