This oddest of Newfoundland and Labrador provincial elections ended with all the drama of the gentle chime of an emailed news release dropping into the inbox.
No excitement of the horserace, just a simple string of seats: Liberals, 22, Progressive Conservatives 13, NDP just two, and three Independents.
So, the Liberals have their all-important majority, which, of course, is the reason Premier Andrew Furey sent us down this rabbit hole in the first place.
Both opposition parties saw their leaders lose their own seats in the House of Assembly, kneecapping the opposition for at least the first little while. All but three incumbents held their seats, but the change was enough to put the Liberals over the top.
And now that the election is over and done with, it looks like those same Liberals might finally be willing to talk about what it is that has to happen next. (Get ready — whatever it is, you’ll be told that you gave the Liberals a mandate to do it.)
Now that the election is over and done with, it looks like the Liberals might finally be willing to talk about what it is that has to happen next. (Get ready — whatever it is, you’ll be told that you gave the Liberals a mandate to do it.)
In his victory speech, Premier Andrew Furey leaned hard on the difficulties, saying, “The first step might be the hardest” and “What is next might be hard,” and “There are still hard decisions ahead of us,” post-pandemic, “There are no overnight solutions but we must move forward.”
Where was the discussion of those hard choices, hard steps and forward-moving policies during the election?
You can be forgiven for not noticing them during the campaign, because, for the most part, they were completely absent.
The economic team, led by Dame Moya Greene and put together by Premier Furey to set a new direction for the province, conveniently missed its deadline for filing a preliminary report as COVID-19 turned the election sprint into a campaign marathon. As a result, voters have no idea what prospective solutions they were voting for.
And wait — we’re already talking mandates.
Premier Furey, in his speech, mentioned a “clear majority government.” The results were barely announced before Liberal campaign co-chair Judy Morrow also called the win a “clear and decisive” mandate.
Unfortunately, it’s neither.
The entire election process was a string of questionable decisions by the province’s chief electoral officer, Bruce Chaulk, and people who had the right to vote were left unable to get ballots and exercise their franchise. It doesn’t really matter if it was a huge number of voters or even whether it was enough to sway the election: what matters is that the system, as it ended up, disfranchised legitimate voters.
Only something close to one out of every two eligible voters in the province actually managed to vote, there’s a district in Labrador where less than 475 votes were cast for all candidates combined, and another where the total votes barely crease 1,000.
And the idea that constitutes a decisive mandate from the public for actions that weren’t even discussed on the campaign trail?
It’s ludicrous.
