Fred Hutton is the new member of the House of Assembly representing Conception Bay East - Bell Island.
Andrew Furey’s hand-picked candidate beat Tony Wakeham’s hand-picked candidate in what turned out to be a test for both leaders.
Hutton didn’t win by much but his personal popularity and likeable style apparently resonated with voters enough to turn the seat from Pea Sea blue to Liberal red for the first time since 2003.
The Liberals poured everything they had into winning this seat, flooding the district with Liberal cabinet ministers and political staffers and with Hutton and Premier And Furey starting election day on Bell Island. The picture above is a still from the short video they posted to Facebook on election day.
The Liberal ground game - voter identification and getting votes to the polls - worked its magic. You can see that in the extraordinarily high advance poll turnout of more than 1700 voters.
Political speculation long held that Andrew Furey would use this by-election as the stepping off point for a general election later this year. Spring was a good time but the fall looked increasingly tempting as time dragged on.
More recently though, the chatter has Furey waiting until after the federal Liberals go to the polls. So much for the supposed distance between provincial and federal Liberals. The Furey Liberals’ game of pretending to distance themselves from Justin apparently only fooled a few reporters and poli sci profs.
Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau could be putting his hopes on Donald Trump. The notion would be that Orange Menace south of the border will frighten enough people away from the Conservatives in Canada and back to the Liberals and eat into the New Democratic support in just enough numbers to let the federal Liberals win a majority.
It would be a convoluted strategy for both the provincial and federal Liberals that depends on lots of dodgy assumptions lining up just right. But it’s a sign that neither party has anything of their own to run an election on.
As for the Pea Seas, the loss of a seat highlights major weaknesses in Tony Wakeham’s new leadership. He could have picked Eugene Manning - Wakeham’s leadership rival - but instead opted for one of his own volunteers. Tina Neary was never a strong candidate, despite her municipal council experience. Her poor performance in the all-candidates session with NTV’s Issues and Answers last weekend only highlighted her shortcomings. She was easily bogged down in ridiculous non-issues by gadfly Darryl Harding and could not land a solid hit on Hutton in over an hour. There are also rumours of problems with fundraising and in voter identification in the Pea Sea camp, which are far more troublesome.
The really obvious problems, though, are the ones revealed in the choice between Manning and Neary. The one that could have more likely produced a win for the party was not the one the caucus would allow. It’s a leadership thing and taking Neary over Manning was the wrong strategic choice for Wakeham.
Voters will likely see more of that, which will only make Andrew Furey look more decisive. That’s the crucial comparison and unless Wakeham changes radically, that’s the comparison Furey will win every time.
Hutton breezed through the campaign, focusing on local issues like road paving or the need for people to have someone to call to know whether or not the Bell Island ferry was running. That campaign messaging by Hutton is possible only because the Pea Seas were incapable of figuring out what would drive votes to them and away from Hutton. After all, there are issues like the cost of living, health care, and road paving, all of which Hutton would be vulnerable on given his four years as a close advisor to Premier Andrew Furey. The Pea Seas never touched them.
As it stands, the Pea Seas will now be on the back foot heading into a second by-election in Fogo Island - Cape Freels, the seat vacated by the death of cabinet minister Derrick Bragg. The Liberals would have had trouble winning the seat given the shift in rural votes and the considerable anti-Liberal sentiment in rural parts of the province. But with this win, the Liberals are on a roll. It took a herculean effort but it worked.
Two things to watch for in the weeks ahead:
What seat will Fred get in cabinet? It would be hard not to reward a loyalist like Fred with a plum seat.
Will Andrew Furey go to the polls sooner rather than later, perhaps in April or May, to steamroll Tony Wakeham before the Pea Seas have a chance to recover?
That would be the smart play since the Pea Seas can fix their considerable problems the longer Furey waits. Then again, the smart play in 2021 was NOT calling an election in the middle of winter in the middle of a pandemic based on your own back-of-the-napkin epidemiological guesses about what might happen with COVID and without any preparation in the elections office for a general election.
Fred Hutton will be a good MHA and a successful cabinet minister. He’s also a natural choice for the Liberals to pick when Andrew Furey leaves as soon after the next election as he can without raising questions. Premier Fred Hutton is in the cards.
But what everyone should remember is that the Liberals and Andrew Furey are not doing all that well, though, in public opinion.
The October Abacus poll laid it bare:
Cost of living: 84% think this is the biggest issue. 77% thing Team Furey is doing a poor or very poor job.
Health care: 74% think it is a big issue. 66% think Furey, health minister Tom Osborne, and health deputy leprechaun Pat Parfrey are the village idiots - to borrow an old Pat-ism - when handling it.
Affordable housing: 43% think it’s a big problem. 70% think whatever Furey and his mob are up to is failing.
And on stuff the government pork machine spits out news releases about regularly, like road paving, almost half thought the government was doing a poor or very poor job.
Ah but look at education, you say. 50% think they are doing a great job. Sure, but only 4% of respondents thought this was a big issue.
The Liberals had to throw everything they had to eke out a small win in this by-election and in two general elections against non-existent or hapless opposition parties. The Liberals are vulnerable but the Pea Seas are fatally weak, which is why the smart money would be on an early election. The longer Andrew and his father dawdle at calling that election, the greater the odds the Pea Seas will get half a clue.
And as it stands with polling numbers like that, a half a clue would be all the Pea Seas would need to have given Andrew Furey and Fred Hutton a very different outcome in Conception Bay East - Bell Island than the comfortable win they got.
Wakeham is a weak leader. He might be effective for the party behind the scenes but they need someone who looks like he or she has a handle on things. Never got a positive vibe from him whenever I heard him in an interview on radio or tv.