The Ghosts and Mr. Chicken($hit)

NL wallows in political greyness

NL Liberal leader John Hogan, left, and NL Pea Sea leader Tony Wakeham, right (not exactly as illustrated) look ahead to the upcoming provincial election with matching trepidation.

That knocking sound you hear is the knees of provincial Liberal organizers staring at the results of the federal election.

There’s no connection between growing Conservative support and waning support for provincial Liberals, Andrew Furey told reporters yesterday. “[Voters] understand that while they may have had issues with former Prime Minister Trudeau for example, they didn’t particularly in every issue have an issue with me and we were able to win two by-elections as a result.”

Voters understand that Furey did not talk about the two by-elections he lost in rural Newfoundland. Embarrassingly bad losses. In one of them, the candidate was a federal Conservative who talked Siobhan Coady’s ear off about the stupid sugar tax and how she needed to ditch it. No Liberals would run for the provincial Liberals. And in the other seat, the Liberals could not even get a sympathy vote for their dead colleague. According to some stories, Furey’s people did not tell him they lost and so he showed up for a victory lap and wound up slinking from the room, in a rage.

People know that besides Andrew Furey, the only other politician who talks this much shit about stuff that is obviously not true is Donald Trump, busily denying his tariffs are a disaster and that tourism is tanking in the States. The Con showing in Newfoundland is a sign of bad times for the Red Team. Furey knows the truth but lies about it because he has no smarter answer either from his own head or from his Brain Trust.

Strong re-election for Cliff Small in Central Newfoundland, decisive victory by Carol Anstey for the Conservatives on the west coast of Newfoundland, and in the east 27-year old Jonathan Rowe outhustled Darin Luther King for the Conservative nomination and lost by a mere 12 votes to Liberal Anthony Germain. Whatever the outcome of the fight in Terra Nova-The Peninsulas after a mandatory recount and likely a judicial recount, the Blue Team showing across Newfoundland should put the fear of God into provincial Liberals. There’s tons of support for Blue and lots of very effective people.

For most of the post-Confederation period, the provincial Liberals dominated rural Newfoundland and Labrador. The Liberals went into the 2015 election provincially with a majority government pretty much locked up based on the half of the province’s seats that are west of Goobies. That was before voting even started. The further you were from Sin John’s, the deeper Red was the district. They picked up a couple of seats between Goobies and Sin Jawns before the election was called and more besides but - due entirely to laziness if not a dose of political stupidity - gave up the last week of the campaign and let the Pea Seas win a few even though the Liberal’s momentum was already threatening to turn seats on the northeast Avalon from dark Blue to deep Red.

Now look at the results of the 2025 federal election. Strong Blue in what used to be strong Red. Strong Red where there used to be strong Blue. The federal Liberals also dominated rural Newfoundland and Labrador after Confederation. They did until 2015. What you are seeing in 2025 is the result of a shift in voting patterns through the 2019 and 2021 elections that is now bursting into bloom. The 2021 election post-mortem linked above explains it in more detail.

You cannot transpose that federal result to provincial politics one for one but given how deeply Blue the traditionally Liberal bastions went on Monday, you can see enough provincial Liberal seats flipping to make Tony Wakeham the next Premier. In Labrador, you could well see two Pea Seas and a Dipper elected provincially with only the southeast district staying Liberal. On the west coast and through central Newfoundland, more than enough districts would flip except perhaps for the Liberal bastion of La Poile, the land of Parsons and Neary, the Ferryland of the Gulf but Red instead of Blue. We already saw signs of that shifting of rural Newfoundland against Liberals in the string of by-election losses the Liberals faced after 2021. Even on the Avalon, there are plenty of seats that would only be be shakily Liberal if they stayed Liberal at all come the next election.

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To understand what happened in this federal election in Newfoundland and Labrador, what’s been going, on and what’s likely to go on federally, you have to follow the trends. You have to know what drove the vote.

1. Change. Doesn’t matter the party in power, after a decade people start to smell the decay and want to freshen things up. As much as the Conservatives owned the “change” option before last November, they still held onto it through this election despite Liberal efforts to change the ballot question.

2. Remittance Politics. The most significant economic development in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 21st century has been the rise of remittance workers. Transients who do some sort of fly-in, fly-out work in western Canada. They bring back more than cash, drugs, and sexually transmitted infections. They bring back political ideas. Not a coincidence that the rise of Conservative strength is in areas where remittance workers are common. That’s connected to a bigger…

3. Change in voters. Generational changes in voters changed the relationship between voters and parties in Newfoundland and Labrador. The old association that tied Liberals and voters and Confederation federally across Newfoundland and Labrador have simply disappeared. Newer voters are motivated by different things and the old social relationships don’t have the same impact or don’t exist at all. Not so long ago, massive unemployment across Newfoundland and Labrador made it easy for politicians to build client-patron relationships since people needed make-work and other government schemes to get enough work for employment insurance. Not so any more.

4. Change in Parties. The modern Liberals are not your Dad’s Liberals. Same is true in spades for the Conservatives as well. They think differently about politics. They target voters in different ways than parties used to. They appeal to different voters for different reasons. The others are regionally rooted or ideologically blind and - as this result shows for Dippers - they are a waa fringe that can disappear as easily as Greens.

This is not a rural/urban thing. All parties in Canada appeal to a cross-section of Canadians, some of whom live in what we might call urban spaces while others are rural. That’s one of the things about this election: the driving issues did not split along geographic boundaries like urban versus rural. That’s why the electoral map - here’s the CTV version - doesn’t look like the one from 2021 when the voting was more clearly an example of Liberals targeting very specific groupings of voters who tended to be more likely urban and on the political left, as people popularly call it.

This election result looks like an older election map of results since we have two major parties, each strong across the whole of the country. The reason is that the Liberals and Conservatives are more like the older style Big tent Parties. The New Democrats are decimated, everywhere, as they have been in the past when they offered no advantage and refused to appeal to more than their narrow base.

In that respect, it is very different from what we have seen in most of this century. And it is a minority government, which is also more common in the 21st century than any time before. A minority will require some careful political management from all parties. Minority governments in this century have been remarkably stable over a long time, challenging the political orthodoxy in Canada that sees minority parliaments as unstable and therefore bad.

Against that backdrop, it’s hard to ignore the decisive defeat voters in Pierre Poilievre’s riding handed him after 20 years as their member in Parliament even as their fellow Canadians voted strongly for the Conservatives. Poilievre may not have to leave the leadership, especially since he delivered such a strong result despite not winning his own seat or the election. Poilievre will not be able to stay on as leader without a seat in the Commons so expect a by-election soon. The question will be where in the country Poilievre might run to get a seat for the new Parliament.

Making that happen quickly would help Prime Minister Mark Carney develop a solid working relationship with Poilievre from the outset. It’s a goodwill move he should consider. If the Conservatives want to tear each other apart, that’s another question and it’s none of Carney’s business if the Conservatives give in to the old Blue party habit of forming a circle when in trouble and firing inward. Look around the caucus and party and see if anyone looks like Dalton Camp.

Expect this minority to last a couple of years, at least. And expect the Liberals to adjust some of what they will do to reflect positions supported by Canadians who voted for the federal Conservatives. There are some strong alignments in the Liberal and Conservative platforms, especially on energy transmission, that offer some chances for co-operation with provinces. Co-operation shouldn’t be surprising.

Provincial Liberal organizers will talk to you about the 53% of the popular vote the Liberals got in the federal election. That’s like talking about the topline numbers in federal polling. It doesn’t tell you anything useful. But they are going to talk bravely because the noise might distract from the sound of their knees knocking. They are going to talk bravely because they don’t have anything else to put on the table except talk and in politics actions count.

The Liberals are about to replace the beige Andrew Furey, who replaced the beiger Dwight Ball, with the grey John Hogan. Hogan’s only two campaign commitments as he walks through the pantomime farce of a Liberal leadership fight is a promise to buy free Shingrix for anyone over 50 years of age and another promise to split off the seniors part of Paul Pike’s department into a separate department. Not very original an idea and nothing that will make any difference in anything except the number of people sitting at the cabinet table, which is already too fat, too full of oxygen wasters. Our provinc e is facing a financial crisis, the economic doldrums, and a world of economic hurt thanks to the Americans and literally the biggest thought John Hogan has - the *only* thoughts John Hogan has is for shingles and finding a job Paul Pike can do without shagging it up.

In other words, Hogan has pledged to keep everything like it is. Liberals who are supporting him talk of his leadership abilities, by which they mean his lack of abilities. The Rule of Opposites applies. Leaders are decisive. Like Ball and Furey, Hogan will be decisively indecisive. Firmly flexible. A Procul Harum song title made flesh at a time when we need lots of colour..

Voters want change. They wanted change in 2015. They didn’t get it. Tony Wakeham and the Pea Seas have seen what strong organization and a clear message can do *in* Newfoundland and Labrador to produce significant political results. All Tony and his crew have to do is copy what they see. Build on it. This may be too much a challenge for them.

Constitutionally, the provincial Liberals must go to the polls by the end of March 2026. That’s five years from the one mess of an election Andrew Furey won, barely. The Liberals should have called an election in 2024. Now they are stuck and unless they take a huge gamble and try to go to the polls in May or June - after they pass that abysmal budget - they are almost guaranteed to go to the polls in the fall. They will stink of desperation and defeat by then since any government that pushes its re-election to the maximum allotted time is already all but dead.

That could be enough to let the Pea Seas slide into office lazily as the Liberals did in 2015. Maybe that’s their plan. But there is so much wrong with the province’s direction and so many opportunities to change things for the better, they should look to the recent federal election to see what real change looks like, what real change can deliver. Look at the Conservatives for sure. Bold. Determined. Full of purpose. And it paid off. But look at the federal Liberals, as well, who remade themselves at least well enough to hang onto office for another few years. Their provincial cousins don’t have the stones to do that.

We have had enough of the ghosts of long dead ideas. They surround us and too many politicians cower in front of them. They are in Andrew Furey’s ridiculous begging letter to Ottawa, which all the federal party leaders, Mark Carney included, paid no heed. Joint fisheries management. Cheap Marine Atlantic fares. More handouts from Uncle Ottawa. Zombies still walking across the political landscape, no flesh left on the the bones, not even enough stink off them to excite anyone. That was the best the Liberals could do. It was pathetic. It is pathetic.

We have lived for too long in the fog of political indecision, even though we can hear through the gloom the seas crashing on stony cliffs ahead, the noise getting louder and louder as we sail onward, ready to lash another dead skipper to the wheel rather than turn away from the noise, away from the rocks, away from the screech of breaking timber or shattering steel and the cries of the dying that we know from bitter experience a hundred years ago comes if we stay steady as she goes, where John Hogan’s dead political hand will take us.

We can cower in fear of the moaning ghosts or we can heed their warning and change course.

We have a choice.

We just a party to offer it up to voters.

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