4 rookie leaders, accountability the key issues in P.E.I. election
None of P.E.I.'s four main party leaders have even sat in the legislature before
It's probably not how Wade MacLauchlan wanted to spend his first week as P.E.I. premier — dealing with the fallout from one of the controversies left behind by his Liberal predecessor.
The former university president was sworn in Feb. 23. Four days later a P.E.I. scandal was spread across the front page of the Saturday Globe and Mail.
The story was about a secretive, failed attempt by the former government to earn millions of dollars in revenues through the regulation of online gambling.
Most of the details shouldn't have come as a shock to native Islanders because the story had been covered in local media before.
But this national attention made everything fresh again, and it wasn't the only skeleton to emerge from the closet of former premier Robert Ghiz.
In the weeks that followed, the auditor general raised concerns that Crown lending agencies were writing off millions in loans to private companies without cabinet approval or public disclosure.
And there was the on-again, off-again controversy surrounding the provincial nominee program, which saw local companies pocket millions of dollars from immigrants paying cash in exchange for permanent residency.
Not surprisingly, P.E.I.'s as-yet unelected Liberal premier wanted to clean house — and introduce some tougher conflict-of-interest and reporting rules — before calling his own election, which made accountability one of the key issues, engaging all parties, in the current campaign.
So is experience.
Batch of newbies
In one of the more unusual Canadian elections, none of the four leaders in this race has ever led a party through an election before. In fact, none has ever held a seat in the provincial legislature.
MacLauchlan, 60, boasts an impressive academic resume, having served as the president of the University of Prince Edward Island for over a decade. His only elected office was a seat on the community council in North Shore, P.E.I. (population 1,500) from 2012 to 2015.
Ghiz's surprise resignation back in November caught the opposition Tories off-guard, too. They had been without a permanent leader for almost two years, and had no plans to select a new one until the end of May 2015.
When Rob Lantz, 45, a former Charlottetown city councillor, won the Progressive Conservative leadership on Feb. 28, he had little more than a month to prepare for the coming election.
Heading into the writ, there was also a purge of the government benches. Eight MLAs — nearly a third of the 27 members of the House — are not seeking re-election, making it difficult to predict an outcome.
Focus on accountability
The Conservatives have made accountability the focus of their campaign and to some degree so have the NDP and the Green Party.
All three parties have promised some kind of public inquiry to probe the e-gaming affair and immigrant nominee program.
They've also all pledged to extend the reach of the province's freedom of information legislation.
And the Tories have promised to take government credit cards and government vehicles away from cabinet ministers, and to freeze MLA salaries until the province tables a balanced budget.
P.E.I. has tended to flip back and forth between Liberal and Conservative governments roughly every three elections, and has only once ever elected an MLA of a different stripe.
This time, the NDP and Greens have been looking for issues to set themselves apart from the two old-line parties and one that rose to prominence, to the surprise of many observers, was abortion.
P.E.I. is the only province where abortions are not performed. Island women are required to travel to Halifax to have the procedure done in hospital, and they are responsible for their own travel costs — the trip can be 3-1/2 hours or more each way, and includes a $45.50 toll across the Confederation Bridge.
Both the Conservatives and Liberals want to maintain the status quo, though the Liberals say they'll address some of the barriers to access, including the requirement that a P.E.I. doctor provide a referral, and the cost of travel.
Both the Green Party and the NDP say they would open a women's health clinic on the island providing local abortion service.
Red, blue (green, orange)
The Greens and the NDP have been trying to convince voters dissatisfied with the previous Ghiz administration that they'll only get more of the same if they keep flip-flopping between Liberal and PC governments.
"Politically we have a tradition that when the electorate gets fed up with the red team, they vote the blue team in and then they get fed up with the blue team and they vote the red team in, and consequently we've had many decades of poison, ping-pong politics on Prince Edward Island," Green Leader Peter Bevan-Baker said during the CBC leaders' debate.
UPEI political science professor Don Desserud says Bevan-Baker and NDP leader Mike Redmond both helped their causes in the two televised debates in the last week of the campaign, and that there was a lot riding on those debates.
"Because there's not an awful lot else for people to look at, frankly," Desserud says.
"The policy platforms of the two main parties are about fine-tuning the system," he says, adding "no one is going to be particularly excited about any of the fine tuning."
Desserud thinks the Liberal's MacLauchlan has been successful in deflecting at least some criticism over government accountability.
And he thinks the NDP and Greens are poised to increase their popular vote, though that won't necessarily translate into seats in the legislature.
P.E.I. has a history of lopsided legislatures. And Desserud says the best outcome for Islanders would be to at least have a stronger opposition that the three Tories that were left when the legislature was dissolved. "Opposition is a key part of responsible government."
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