NS Politics

Everything is politics, at least to someone.

Author: Streetski

  • Liberal Death and Liberal Resurrection

    General thoughts on a provincial and federal election.

    The Nova Scotia provincial election of November 2024 was boring. Which is probably good since all the exciting elections recently have been about someone losing the plot.  But Tim Houston has held it together, “A good man you might disagree with” to paraphrase John McCain. Houston was only one term in and had a deeply unpopular federal Liberal party holding the provincial Liberals back. My absence will have to excuse my unfamiliarity with Zach Churchill and if they were doomed from the start. Calling an early election after promising not to is a class move, but no one likes keeping promises when it’s hard.

    We were getting electoral reform at some point, right Trudeau?

    Conservatism Rising

    Economic issues have been eating at the general public for a couple years now. I’m still convinced the federal liberals lose the 2021 election to a conservative minority if they didn’t seize on several conservative premiers looking stupid with how they were handling ongoing COVID measures. Needless to say, everyone be pitching tax cuts in 2024-2025. But even pitching more tax savings couldn’t save the NS Liberals. I don’t think what came next could have given them a win but it might have saved their party status.

    By Matthew McMullin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154461541

    Die Libs!

    The federal liberals were destined to a similar fate. But bizarrely didn’t seem able to boot Justin Trudeau to attempt to cut the bleeding. I was sure no one wanted to take the fall, until that fateful day.

    Et Tu, Chrystia?

    It’s likely impossible to know all the motivations involved, was this a mistake on Trudeau’s part, was he given bad advice, was Freeland waiting for an opportunity? But to cut to the chase Freeland stabbing Trudeau saved the Liberal party. (My Caesar metaphor breaks down a bit on that point, but Freeland held to the rule that you probably don’t want to hold the knife that stabs.) Mark Carney becomes the new leader and PM and gives to the inevitable election call.

    Milhouse Loses The Trump Card

    But before I give all credit to Carney, who generally seems like the boring centrist dad a lot of people crave right now, we can’t discount how effective Trump was at getting him elected and how ineffective Pierre Poilievre was at pivoting the message. To avoid a long digression, Trump is an idiot and the willingness of half the US population to follow him off a cliff is the swan song of this dying age. With that much of a following, behind that much stupid, it is a huge national and global risk. And with all those chips down we had Poilievre, who up to this point only had a real strength at messaging (the guy was an MP for 20 years with no bills)… fail to message. Except enough to scare NDP supporters to back a more centrist Liberal party.

    Centre-right leaning provincial conservatives didn’t seem to care if Poilievre lost which is notable. A glimpse perhaps that they see too much of Alberta’s Danielle Smith brand of “break the government to own the Libs” in him. That might be projection on my part, and a certain Elon Musk owns that crown now.

    The analysis that given a couple more weeks we likely would have seen the Conservative win seems possible given how close we got to a two party system in that election and the direction of the polls. NDP losing ground to a central banker who at least isn’t as bad as the other guy, and more populist economic messaging on the right. There’s a lot of data with none of it being easy to solve.

    What’s Next?

    Having lived in a province with only viable NDP and Conservative parties, do I think the NS Liberals are dead? It’s a more interesting “what if” had the federal Liberal party died this year, but now I would say no. Not unless the NDP tries to choke them out of the centre, and that risks alienating their core supporters. The Alberta NDP happened into a situation in which the Liberal party was nonviable, right when the right split itself in half. They emerged as the only surviving alternative. I expect a return to the status quo in NS so long as there are no breaks in the PC party. But Houston is leading a very boring party so far (let’s see where the Uranium fights go, I’m living the coal on the rocky mountains all over again).

    As for the federal government, I think their task is impossible. Especially for a minority government. But if they can swerve around the on-again, off-again maniacs to the south to give us a bit more independence, I’ll take what I can get.

    Alberta politics weren’t boring, but that’s not necessarily good. I’m more bored now in my native land, but still not inspired.

  • Books! – Flamer by Mike Curato

    Let’s start Pride Month 2025 with a book about the big gay that Alberta doesn’t want kids to read. (Maybe, if the people agree, or a minimum age, unclear).

    Cover art is indicative of the art style, black and white with red to highlight certain scenes.

    First let’s talk about the graphic novel, because it’s good. It even deals with a few things I have some familiarity with; being a teenage boy, being at scout camp, and being gay.

    The novel follows 14 year old Aiden at scout summer camp, right before he moves from middle school to high school in the mid 1990s. He doesn’t fit the masculine ideal; short, fat, and not good at sports. Boys will 100% pick up on that as a vector for bullying. But he starts off having a history of liking scouts and camp since the boys there are nicer to him than at school, even if he can’t completely escape bullies.

    It’s what I would call “a coming out to yourself” story. Because if society only tells you bad things about being gay you probably won’t be thrilled to find that out about yourself initially. I sure didn’t have fun with that step and it was later than 14 that I was willing to examine it. As a result it deals with themes of depression and self-harm, but it ends on a hopeful note. Expect a lot of F-slurs, thankfully in my time and space growing up in school this wasn’t the case, it had been toned down to boys calling each other gay* all the time.

    *Pejorative

    I would highly recommend for gay teens since its the kind of character and story I wish I had when I was younger. Maybe even for teens that don’t fit the ideal societal image of what they should be, or really anyone, god knows we could use a dose of empathy. Someone more aware of the teens would know if this works for a general audience, at the back of my mind I always worry that pitching a book with a gay character to someone will be viewed as an insult.

    Why I’m Even Talking About It

    This book came out in 2020, but in 2025 the government of Alberta put it on it’s not age appropriate for schools list. The silver lining is that release made me aware of Flamer, which I had not happened across despite the overlaps with my life.

    The provincial government flagged four books, all graphic novels: Gender Queer (I was already aware conservatives have gone after this one a lot), Fun Home, Blankets, and Flamer. If you were to put a gun to my head I would guess they all skew to high school level, so yes, maybe they don’t need to be in elementary schools but the school boards would have likely moved them if notified. That’s taking the government’s word that they were physically found in certain schools.

    The personal connection and uncertainty about what exactly the problem with Flamer’s content made me pick it up. The reference material at the provincial government link above didn’t do a great a job of selling what was so controversial about it, especially compared to the other ones that do depict nudity and sex which the government happily provided examples of for concerned parents.

    So what gives.

    Maybe they had never talked to a teenage boy before, or the horror of watching them interact with each other?

    Is the topic of sex and masturbation an issue? The amount of jerking it required by the average teenage boy suggests that avoiding it is somewhere between impossible and likely not good for anyone.

    Do we say we can’t talk about homophobia? That’s not a good sign for certain peoples rights.

    Do we say we can’t talk about teen suicide? Probably not good for preventing teen suicide.

    This is very easily going to end up a witch hunt in which the people who show up to these discussions will want anything gay out of schools. See this CBC article for more on northern migration of the library wars.

    Why I’m Talking About It Outside Alberta

    This strategy will be tried elsewhere if it keeps working. They don’t even need to be the majority to have a profound impact. Alberta politicians are doing a good job of giving the social conservatives and conspiracy theorists what they want while telling the public they are doing it for reasonable reasons.

    It’s the just asking questions of policy.

    If they keep being allowed to ask those questions we have to keep fighting a culture war while everything else gets worse.

  • And Thus, Words

    As I decide if this is something is something I want to do, write words by and for myself, where everyone can see me.

    Let’s start with background, I’m an idiot. But I’ve thought about a lot of stuff, and that’s about the credentials required to start blog or podcast. Podcast would require more expensive equipment so here we are.

    NS born and raised, until I fell ass backwards into the Alberta oil sands. I was an Alberta transplant after the booms were over, too young to hit one of those, and I lived out there for several years. I came back to NS in 2024. I want to keep thinking about what politics, economy, history, and media mean now that I’m back home. In a place that seems infinitely more boring (I say with love) than what I left behind.

    At this point, this is primarily for myself so I make no promises as to what it will look like. I’m not a journalist, or an expert, but if the world feels like it wants to march into dark places I can at least speak calmly into the void.