CAPE BRETON
Eye-catching treehouse.
Nova Scotia municipalities are preparing for elections in October that most of them would rather postpone until there’s greater certainty that the vote can be conducted safely and fairly.
But the provincial government insists that the elections go ahead as scheduled, prompting a stiff rebuke from the non-profit organization the province had hired to conduct educational programming that encourages candidate and voter participation.
Municipal Affairs Minister Chuck Porter, in a letter to the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, answered their concerns about the potential impact of COVID-19 on their elections with some gratuitous advice on how to run those elections safely. He added some pointers on how candidates can campaign in perilous times.
“This is an unprecedented time, and now more than ever, it is critical that the democratic rights of citizens are preserved and respected,” Porter wrote to the federation.
It’s a little rich for a minister in the only government in Canada that hasn’t faced its legislature since the pandemic hit to lecture Nova Scotia municipalities — whose councils met throughout the COVID-19 outbreak — about democracy.
Nevertheless, that’s what Porter did, and he pointed to several vacant seats on municipal councils as the reason the elections need to proceed as planned.
If the seats remain unfilled, Porter wrote, “there will be thousands of Nova Scotians who will not have a representative at the table when those councils make important decisions about the future of their communities.”
If that seems like a legitimate point, consider that the province can call special elections to fill those vacancies any time it wants to, without requiring full elections in all 49 municipalities.
Springtide Collective is the Halifax-based non-profit that withdrew from its provincial contract to provide the educational programming.
“How could we encourage participation in an election, when the two orders of government that share responsibility in law for its administration don’t agree on whether it can happen safely and fairly?” Springtime executive director Mark Coffin asked in an open letter to Porter.
The province’s insistence that the elections proceed has more than a few municipalities wrestling with how to get it done.
The minister suggested more polling stations with fewer electors in each to help with social distancing, encouraging voters to take advantage of advance polls and alternatives to paper ballots, including voting by mail, phone or online.
The province’s larger municipal units are putting some of those alternatives in place, but for smaller municipalities offering a suite of voting options just isn’t reasonable.
Coffin’s letter notes that, just months away from municipal election day — Oct. 17 — the procedures to determine how it will be done safely and fairly don’t exist.
“As far as I can tell, this will be the most complicated and challenging election to administer in Canadian history,” Coffin wrote, perhaps a little hyperbolically, but to illustrate his point he noted that Nova Scotia municipalities have nearly as many election administrations as there are states in America, and that voters will elect more councillors and mayors than there are members of Parliament.
Porter offered this advice to candidates running in the municipal elections: “(U)se signs, printed materials, telephone, social media, or virtual options to engage with constituents rather than canvassing door to door.”
Municipalities are worried that coronavirus concerns will results in even lower voter turnout than usual, or that a second COVID-19 wave in the fall could force the elections to be postponed, after they’ve spent a great deal of time and money putting various voting options in place.
Municipal elections in Nova Scotia suffer from poor voter turnout at the best of times, and incumbents have a distinct advantage over their challengers simply by virtue of name recognition.
That advantage is amplified this time around by the coronavirus’ constraints on campaigning, making it extremely difficult for newcomers to overcome the incumbents’ advantage.
It’s a testament to their sense of fair play that, rather than press that political advantage, the vast majority of municipal councillors — the incumbents — would prefer to postpone the election.
The provincial government, on the other hand, does not suffer from the same sense of political altruism. It wants the municipal elections out of the way so the field is clear for a provincial election, likely next spring.
The Liberals have seen their poll numbers climb through the COVID-19 crisis because Nova Scotians give them high marks — with some justification — for managing the health emergency. They’ll be looking for the first chance to go to polls, before that popularity dissipates but not so soon as to appear opportunistic.