[Editor’s note: this story is one of five Coast articles selected as finalists for the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. All five stories are collected here.]
Darrell Dexter is telling me a story. It’s about Dennis
Mackie, the brother he didn’t know he had. It was 1994 and Rick, one of
the two brothers he’d actually grown up with, had just telephoned him
at home.
“Are you setting down?” Rick asked. Darrell wasn’t. “Well, set down
then. We’re going to the airport,” Rick informed him, then paused a
beat…”to meet our brother.”
Their brother? Alan wouldn’t have been on an airplane. “Where’s
Alan?” Darrell demanded.
“Not Alan.”
Not Alan? “What?”
“I’ll pick you up and explain it all on the way to the airport.”
Today, Dexter looks up, shrugs. “I don’t know if you can use that in
your story, but…”
It turns out that Darrell’s father, Elvin, had a relationship with a
British woman while serving overseas during World War II. In 1944, they
had a child, Dennis. The complication was that Elvin was already
married, with a wife and two children back in Canada.
After returning to Nova Scotia in 1945, Elvin confessed his
infidelity to his wife. Though “naturally upset,” Florence convinced
herself her husband could have remained in England but had chosen
instead to come back to her and their children. In the mysterious,
never-completely-knowable ways of marriage, Elvin and Florence came to
terms with what had come between them, and moved on with their
lives.
Mostly.
Though they kept the information secret from family and friends,
they did write to Dennis’ mother, offering to take her baby and raise
him as their son. While Dennis’ mother demurred, she did send them a
letter when Dennis was old enough for school. He needed shoes, she
wrote. Elvin and Florence rushed out, bought a new pair and shipped
them to England.
After that…nothing. No contact. “Why interfere?” was Elvin’s
succinct explanation when Darrell asked about it 50 years later.
But this missing family puzzle-piece helped Darrell Dexter put his
own childhood in context. It explains, for example, why Elvin and
Florence decided to adopt Alan in 1949 even though they already had two
children of their own and would later have two more (including Darrell,
who was born in 1957). “They felt that if someone else was raising my
father’s child in England, the least they could was raise someone
else’s here,” Dexter tells me, then laughs. “Cosmic karma.” It also
explains why, when Darrell was in Grade Two and his father—who was
working in a mill near their Milton, Queen’s County, home—landed
better-paying work at the Halifax shipyard, Florence insisted on moving
to the city with him. “Mother didn’t want to be away from her husband
again.”
Meanwhile, in England, Dennis Mackie grew up, joined the British
army, became a paratrooper, retired and bought a vegetarian bed and
breakfast. When he turned 50, he set out to find his birth father. He
eventually found the phone number and called. Florence answered.
“You don’t know who I am,” he began. “My name is Dennis
Mackie—“
“Oh, Dennis,” Florence cheerily cut him off. “I know exactly who you
are.”
Dennis explained he just wanted a chance to meet his father, spend a
few hours with him. “No one else needs to know,” he said.
“Dennis,” the now-76-year-old Florence replied. “This is ridiculous.
You need to come and meet your family.”
Which is how Darrell and Rick Dexter came to be standing outside the
international arrivals area in the Halifax International Airport one
afternoon in 1994 waiting to meet the 50-year-old brother they had not
previously known existed.
“When he came through customs, my brother and I looked at one
another,” Dexter tells me. “No DNA testing required! He was the
spitting image of my father.”
The family reunion went well—“we went to a hockey game, he met my
wife and son”—and they have a continuing relationship. But Dexter
admits it all took time. “It was a good object lesson,” he adds. “I
remember walking away thinking to myself, whenever you think you know
everything…”
I will confess I was thinking much the same thing. And wondering why
Darrell Dexter was telling me this story, especially now, in mid-April
with a provincial election campaign expected to be called any day.
In part, of course, it was because I had asked. “Tell me about
yourself,” I’d begun, and I’d told his aide I wanted to write a
personal profile of the man. Maybe Dexter, who’d trained as a
journalist, was trying to help out by offering up a little-known
personal anecdote.
Or perhaps it was more calculated than that. I was interviewing him
the day after a Liberal party operative sent the CBC internet photos of
a topless Lenore Zann, the Truro-raised actor who’d just been announced
as the NDP’s candidate there. Dexter, in fact, had to excuse himself
midway through our interview to talk with CBC-TV reporter Paul Withers
about the Zann photos. Perhaps Dexter was being pre-emptive, trying to
prevent some political opponent from turning his innocuous,
happy-ending personal story into a tawdry, tabloid-style headline:
“Dexter has secret love-child brother.” These days, better to get
everything out there.
Or perhaps…perhaps I was reading way too much into it. Maybe
Darrell was just being Darrell, the rumpled, friendly,
what-you-see-is-what-you-get guy you’d like to swap stories with over a
pint or two down at the local. But the truth is Dexter and I know each
other only as journalist and politician, our conversation took place
not in a tavern but in his leader’s office on the 10th floor of the
Centennial Building in downtown Halifax and the only beverage on tap
was water.
Still, the question of his motivation is more important than it may
seem at first. On Tuesday we go to the polls in the province’s 38th
general election, and many voters are still puzzling through the
question of who Darrell Dexter really is and, more importantly, who he
will turn out to be if we do the once-unthinkable and the
still-almost-unimaginable and elect our first-ever New Democratic Party
government on June 9, making Darrell Dexter our 27th premier.
Many Nova Scotians of a certain age are still getting their
heads around the March 11 headline in the Halifax Herald: “NDP
Will Win Next Election,” it declared flatly, basing its conclusion on
the results of the latest public opinion poll.
Darrell Dexter is, of course, a Nova Scotian of that certain
age—and knows all too well his party’s history of marginalization, of
moral victories, of defeats snatched from the jaws of victory, of “Nova
Scotians would never…” of almost…of next time.
Dexter’s political baptism came as a 22-year-old student when he
volunteered in Alexa McDonough’s quixotic 1979 federal election
campaign. She finished third, par for the NDP in those days. By the
time McDonough finally won a seat in the provincial
legislature—becoming its lone MLA—two years and three elections
later, Dexter was in the navy and stationed on the other coast. “I saw
it on the news,” he says.
He didn’t become fully active in partisan politics until 1988 when,
back in Halifax and working as a lawyer, he volunteered in the
provincial election campaign. At the time the party—pale shades of
today—was optimistic about making a modest electoral breakthrough.
John Buchanan’s patronage-riddled, 10-year-old Tory government seemed
vulnerable; the Liberal opposition was a mess. But the wily Buchanan
punctured the NDP’s hope-balloon by coupling his election announcement
with news that the star NDP candidate, a young lawyer named Bob Levy,
was dropping out to accept—what else?—a patronage appointment to
the bench.
“It was devastating,” remembers Dexter, who’d spent much of the week
before in the party’s Halifax office confidently putting together
candidate binders for the campaign.
It took a decade for the party to recover. By 1998, the NDP had a
handsome, dynamic young leader in Robert Chisholm and its workers were
on a high following their unexpected success in a federal election the
year before; they’d won six of 11 Nova Scotia seats. The Liberals, by
contrast, had dumped their own leader, premier John Savage, before
he’d even completed his first term. And the new Tory leader, a country
doctor named John Hamm, was little known beyond his own riding.
Dexter, who’d won election as a Dartmouth city councillor four years
before, was the NDP’s provincial campaign chair and sacrificial
candidate in Dartmouth-Cole Harbour. “I was taking on the minister of
justice in a riding in which I didn’t live at the time,” he recalls of
the odds against him. His law partners wished him well, but coupled it
with a confident, “See you in 38 days.”
Dexter campaigned relentlessly, following what he called the “two
housecoat rule,” knocking on doors into the night until he encountered
a second woman dressed in her housecoat. “Then I knew it was too late
to keep knocking on doors.” He began to realize something seismic was
shifting when, shortly before voting day, a local radio poll showed the
NDP winning all three Dartmouth ridings, including his.
In the end, the NDP won 19 seats—Dexter’s among them—putting
them in an electoral dead-heat with the incumbent Liberals who somehow
managed to cling to power for another year before finally calling
another election.
The NDP seemed primed to win government. But news of Chisholm’s
failure to tell the truth about a minor personal indiscretion—as a
young man, he had been convicted of drinking and driving—spilled out
during the final days of the campaign, and the party’s governing dream
disappeared.
There are plenty of people today, including many New Democrats, who
say that losing in 1999 was the best thing that could have happened to
their wannabe governing party. “If they’d won,” agrees Brian Flinn, the
political reporter for allnovascotia.com, “they would have
tried to run a classic NDP government. They would have come into office
trying to change everything all at once. They’d probably have blown it
and then they’d be gone. Forever.”
Acknowledges a current NDP strategist: “The 11 seats we actually won
in 1999 is probably a more accurate reflection of what our real support
was at the time. Being the official opposition gave us the chance to
grow more slowly.”
There were some stutter steps along the way. After Chisholm resigned
following the 1999 defeat, the party chose Helen MacDonald, a former
Cape Breton MLA who couldn’t even get herself re-elected. She was
forced to quit after a year of political infighting and a caucus
revolt.
Dexter—modest, easy-going and well regarded in party circles
because of his years of behind-the-scenes work—became interim leader
in 2001.
But the day he announced he was running for the job permanently, he
was blindsided by an email alleging he had also been convicted of drunk
driving as a 19-year-old. Dexter wisely didn’t duck the issue. “I don’t
make excuses and, from the day it happened, I took responsibility for
my own actions,” he told the Daily News. But then he put the
story into context: “I don’t think this is important to anybody. There
are all kinds of things that are important to people’s lives and
something that happened to me 25 years ago isn’t one of them.”
The next year, Dexter handily won his party’s leadership convention
and began the slow process of remaking the party in his own image.
If you want to understand what kind of premier Darrell Dexter
will be, you need to go back and consider again his personal history
beyond the story of the brother he didn’t know he had.
Because of Florence’s decision to follow Elvin to his new job in
Halifax, Dexter grew up with one foot in the city, the other in rural
Nova Scotia. He spent the school year in working-class, north end
Halifax, then the day school ended decamped to spend summers with his
grandparents and extended family in Milton. That lasted until Grade 9,
when his grandfather died and the family moved back to Milton so his
mother could look after his grandmother.
By then, Darrell, an outgoing, athletic kid, had already established
himself in north end Halifax. He had a paper route and his last
delivery of the day was to CJCH radio. There he’d kibitz with the
station’s morning man, Jerry Lawrence, who later became a Tory cabinet
minister, and Walter Fitzgerald, the sportscaster who went on to be
mayor and a Liberal cabinet minister. Lawrence would sometimes
spontaneously interview him on air about “kid stuff.” Afterwards,
Darrell would wander into the newsroom and argue with Fitzgerald over
his wrong-headed choice of “sports hero of the day.” “I was always
plugging for the Montreal Canadiens,” Dexter remembers. On his final
day as a paper carrier, Fitzgerald urged Darrell to listen to his
sportscast the next morning. “He made me his sports hero of the day,”
Dexter remembers with a mix of nostalgia, pride and respect for the
kindness of an adult who would do such a thing for a kid who was
“probably more a nuisance than anything else.”
After enrolling at Liverpool High, Dexter says he “took the academic
road less travelled. I’d look for any excuse not to study.”
I ask Dexter about an old CBC-TV profile of him I’d recently seen on
YouTube. In it, a high school friend named Dan Hatt recalls that as
early as Grade 10, Dexter had predicted that when he grew up he was
going to be “the NDP premier of Nova Scotia.”
Dexter laughs. “I know Danny wouldn’t lie,” he says, “but I
certainly don’t remember that.”
He does remember flirting briefly with the NDP, but not out of any
ideological commitment. “I was interested enough in politics to go to
the local nomination meetings for all three parties. The meetings for
the two mainstream parties were packed; the NDP nominating meeting was
in a union hall and there were maybe eight people in total.” Reasoning
that the other parties had “all the help they needed,” Dexter
volunteered for the NDP. His actual participation in the campaign, he
allows, was “modest.”
After high school, Dexter attended university, mostly because his
friends did. He preferred social life to classes. “He was a ladies’
man,” says Tom Regan, a fellow student who is now the acting executive
director of the Online News Association in Washington, DC. “He was a
fun guy to be around because he was always willing to try
anything.”
He barely “scraped through” first year, earning only four of five
credits. Not that he cared. He wasn’t planning to go back. He’d landed
a well-paying union summer job at the Teleglobe telecommunications
facility in Mill Cove and hoped to stay on. But one morning in August,
Dexter was digging a cable trench with his usual enthusiasm when his
foreman advised him to take it easy. “I’ve been here for 21 years,” the
man said, “and every day I come to work, the ditch is still here.”
Twenty-one years? Dexter tried to imagine himself still
digging trenches in 21 years. “Even at union wages,” he asked himself,
“do I really want to do that?”
That night, Dexter rummaged around under his bed to find where he’d
dumped his university re-enrolment forms.
Not that he suddenly became a committed academic. This time, he got
waylaid by student politics, winning the election as the external vice
president of the King’s College students’ union. That gave him the
opportunity to travel to conferences and meet other passionate,
committed young student politicians, including Dan O’Connor, then the
executive director of the National Union of Students and now Dexter’s
chief of staff and the architect of the current election strategy.
At one point, Tom Regan, whose uncle was Liberal premier Gerry
Regan, remembers dragging Dexter to a Liberal party convention. They
briefly became involved in the youth wing’s constitution committee but
“it didn’t take. Even then,” Regan says now, “his thinking was more to
the left of centre, more NDP.”
Dexter’s undergraduate years came to an awkward end. He still needed
a credit for the course he’d missed in first year but the university
wasn’t keen to allow him to take six in his final semester, probably
because he hadn’t done all that well in the courses he’d passed. So he
decided to continue in school, combining his final BA credit with
courses for a bachelor of education degree. There were no jobs for
teachers when he finished, so he then signed up for the new one-year
bachelor of journalism program at King’s.
His most memorable moment in journalism school came during the Iran
hostage crisis when Dexter and two fellow students—Marty Cohn, now
the Toronto Star‘s deputy editor, and Kerry DeLorey, a Halifax
photographer—decided, on a whim, to call the American embassy in
Tehran in faint hopes of getting a radio interview. Surprisingly,
someone answered the phone: “American Nest of Spies,” the voice said.
Though that was the extent of the scoop, the CBC quickly picked up
their tape and story of the call.
Not that it helped Dexter. He was supposed to have been part of the
first journalism graduating class in 1981, but wasn’t because he
couldn’t pass the school’s modest French language comprehension
requirement. (He finally got the degree two years later after much
tutoring.)
Armed with his BA and his two other almost-degrees, Dexter was
trying to figure out what to do next when a navy recruiter suggested a
career as a military public affairs officer. Dexter signed up and was
sent to the west coast.
There, he met his wife Kelly—“still the love of my life,” he says
with genuine affection—on the barracks’ front lawn. She was doing the
“military option” at Katimavik, a federal post-high school volunteer
program, while she figured out which university she wanted to attend.
Dexter convinced her to go to King’s, his Halifax alma mater. Shortly
after, Dexter left the navy and followed her back east so they could
get married and so Darrell could embark on yet another new career plan:
he would become a lawyer.
To make ends meet while he waited to get into Dal law school—he
scored in the top 14 percent on his admissions exam but had to upgrade
his undergraduate marks and earn tuition—Dexter did a stint as a
reporter at the Daily News. It was not an entirely happy
experience. At one point he got threatened with a lawsuit for something
he didn’t write: On an innocuous story of Dexter’s about a local
restaurant, the editor decided to add—under Dexter’s byline—some
critical comments of his own about the establishment’s food. “You
should have seen the look on Darrell’s face when he came to work the
next morning,” Tom Regan recalls. The incident was eventually settled
out of court.
For his part, Dexter remembers that, “when I left, [publisher David]
Bentley told me, ‘Come back if you get over this law school
nonsense.'”
Like most politicians, Dexter can remember everything ever written
about him. During our interview, for example, he plucks from the air my
description from an earlier article about how his career path had
“caromed like a pinball” from job to job.
“It’s true,” Dexter admits, but makes the case that all his various
experiences helped shape the politician he has become. “The navy, for
example,” he says, “taught me leadership skills and how to motivate
people.”
He also makes the more general point that society too often puts too
much pressure on young people to make important life decisions before
they’re ready. “I made that pitch in a speech to a business audience
recently,” Dexter tells me. “I said, ‘For god’s sake, do something that
gives you joy.’ A lawyer came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Where were
you when I was in law school?'”
Darrell Dexter ultimately found his own joy—and his future—in
politics.
In 2001, the day after he became interim NDP leader, Dexter
told Daily News columnist David Rodenhiser that one of the
reasons his party had lost the 1999 election was that “we became too
careful, way too careful about the things we were saying. That led to
people not getting a clear sense of who we were and what we wanted to
do.”
Some might argue that that is exactly what is happening to Dexter
and the NDP in this election campaign.
“Darrell understands what it takes to get elected,” explains former
NDP leader Robert Chisholm, who has known Dexter since he ran
Chisholm’s successful 1991 by-election campaign in Halifax Atlantic and
supports his approach, “but he also believes in what the NDP stands
for.”
The question, of course, is whether what the NDP stands for and what
it takes to get elected are one and the same. Or, indeed, whether what
the NDP stands for and what Darrell Dexter stands for are the same.
Critics can’t diss and dismiss him—as they did former leader Alexa
McDonough—as a silver-spoon socialist. And no one can argue Dexter is
an effete, let’s-debate-dialectics socialist either. He is, as he once
jokingly described himself, a “conservative progressive” whose
pragmatic, populist policies are deeply rooted in his own
working-class, urban-rural biography.
As party leader, Dexter has focused—mostly successfully—on
human-level, hot-button issues: public auto insurance; rising gas
prices; health care wait times; emergency room closures; electricity
prices; nursing home costs. That focus has helped rebuild NDP support
to the point that it is, once again, within imagining distance of
power.
At the same time, Dexter’s view of how government should work, and
what it can do, has been forged—perhaps even altered—by his
relationship with popular former Tory premier John Hamm during the
three years Hamm led a minority government kept in power by Dexter’s
NDP.
“Dexter thought highly of Hamm,” says allnovascotia’s Brian Flinn.
“And it went both ways. At points, it was more like a coalition
government.”
These days, Dexter invokes Hamm—and especially Hamm’s careful
approach to debt and deficit—almost as often as (and with more
justification than) does Rodney MacDonald.
In fact, the NDP defeated MacDonald’s government last month,
ostensibly because it planned to renege on Hamm’s pledge to plunk down
the entire $830 million Nova Scotia received from the Atlantic Accord
on the province’s massive debt. “It’s ironic that this government will
wipe out the progress made by the Hamm government,” Dexter declared in
the legislature the day the government fell, “and it is ironic that the
defenders of that program turn out to be on the opposition
benches.”
All of which, of course, makes it tricky for his opponents to trot
out the “red menace” usually invoked to frighten voters whenever the
socialists get too close to power.
Not that the Tories haven’t tried. When their pre-election
“riskyndp” ploy fizzled—partly because it often didn’t fit the known
facts and partly because it flew in the face of the Tories’ own riskily
profligate ways—the Tories tried another tack: Darrell’s OK,
the new argument went, but look out for the people behind him.
They’re really scary!
Dexter laughs when I bring up this argument. “Scary like the
Springhill chief administrative officer who’s running for us in
Cumberland South? Scary like the retired RCMP officer, a guy with 30
years’ policing experience, who’s running in Pictou Centre?”
Dexter is equally dismissive of claims his caucus isn’t ready to
govern. “We have 128 years of collective experience in the House of
Assembly,” he says, rhyming off a laundry list of
lawyer-educator-socialworker-entrepreneur caucus credentials.
What many independent observers find more impressive is that,
despite having a number of strong-willed, independent individuals in
his caucus—including veteran MLAs like environmentalist Howard
Epstein and Rhodes scholar Graham Steele—Dexter has somehow managed
to keep them all on the same message during the long years in
opposition. And they’re even more likely to toe the Dexter line if the
party becomes the government on the strength of his current moderate
campaign.
None of which, of course, answers the question of whether the party,
in its effort to finally win government, has turned itself into a pale
imitation of the social democratic party its core supporters have
loyally followed through its wilderness decades.
Nowadays, Darrell Dexter spends a lot of time talking to chambers of
commerce. Public auto insurance, a key plank in his 2006 campaign, is
virtually absent this time. Thanks largely to the weakness of the Green
Party, the NDP has also been able to embrace such eco-unfriendly
positions as cutting energy taxes while dismissing outright the
environmentally popular idea of a carbon tax to cut consumption.
Dexter’s most surprising and dangerously difficult-to-fulfill
promise—one he says is rooted in his memories of a family living
“paycheque to paycheque…if you wanted something, you had to barter
for it, make it yourself or find the way to earn the money to buy
it”—has been to make balancing the books first among equals in his
election platform. Though his proposed post-election audit to determine
the true state of the province’s finances gives him the usual
politician’s get-out-of-promises-free card, Dexter continues to insist
that, regardless of its outcome, an NDP government will bring in a
balanced budget for 2010-11.
Is that possible? Is it even a good idea? The current conventional
economic wisdom holds that the best, fastest, perhaps only way out of
our current recession is for governments to spend, and then spend some
more, especially on infrastructure, deficits be damned. Darrell Dexter
begs to differ.
Though prudent financial management isn’t usually associated in the
public mythology with NDP governments, Dexter is quick to point out the
NDP in Manitoba and Saskatchewan have well-earned reputations as
careful guardians of the public purse and that the party’s founding
father, Tommy Douglas, never ran a deficit in 17 years as premier of
Saskatchewan “because he knew that deficits would erode and delay the
goals he held dear, like publicly funded Medicare.”
Dexter genuinely believes that applies as well in Nova Scotia, where
deficit spending and, more importantly, our $12-billion-plus
debt—largely the result of failed industrial development schemes from
the Stanfield ’60s, propped-up dying industries during the Regan ’70s
and profligate spending in the Buchanan ’80s—has not only eroded our
ability to do the things governments need to do, from maintaining
schools to keeping hospital wards open to fixing potholed roads, but
will also delay the prospect of improving social services or reducing
taxes in the future.
If Darrell Dexter does become premier Tuesday, it will probably be
less because of what he stands for—perhaps especially his tough-love
“conservative progressive” views on what governments need to do to make
things right—than for the simple fact he is not Rodney MacDonald.
The real trick for Dexter then will be to hold on to power—and his
principles—during a time of global economic crisis, unrelenting
pressure to stimulate the economy and, of course, mounting public
impatience for the good times to begin again. If he can do that, he
could be premier for a long time.
But first, of course, he has to get elected on Tuesday. And that is
still no done deal. As Dexter himself has said, “whenever you think you
know everything…”
Related Stories
Premier Rodney MacDonald’s demise
Election campaign moves along right on script
Darrell Dexter on the campaign trail: photo essay
NDP majority: What to do now?
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2009.
Great article !
People being concerned about Dexter’s youthful indiscretions need to ask themselves… Is that anything CLOSE to driving drunk as an adult member of Legislature, leaving the scene of an accident, arguing with a bystander/photog who caught you in the act, and then having it all covered up by your “boss”.
Exactly.
Great insights, Mr Kimber. As always.
For the record, Ernie Fage has never been convicted of drunk driving. He was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident.
/covers ass
Typical Kimber left-wing tripe.
excellent article . maybe this province will finally have a
” premier ” for the people
And the winner is………Dexter.
And the loser is ………Dexter.
Nice guys finish first.
He’s really a Tory, and makes Layton look a real mutt.
I bet DD is really looking forward to telling Joan Jessome and her friends ‘Don’t call me, cos I won’t call you’.
In 15 months he has a pile of contracts expiring. Poor sod, less federal money next year and the next 5 years. More moaning municipalities. Kiss goodbye to the gold plated Library and other follies. DD looked good tonight and kept saying what I like to hear – ‘Balance the budget. Can’t keep increasing the debt’ Sounds like Joe Clark 30 years ago.
It looks like we are about to have a real TORY. Hallelujah !
Can’t wait to vote.
Kudos to Stephen Kimber for a great piece of journalism & an excellent article.
It would be great to see other journalists in Halifax (with any of the various media outlets) put the same level of thought and attention into their journalism.
This is a great & detailed profile of Darrell Dexter — I learned a great deal through reading through it earlier in the print edition of The Coast (six pages!).
YAY!!! BUH-BYE RODNEY!
now if we could only get rid of the idiots on city council, plus our embarrassment for a mayor, AND the inept Chief ‘Wiggum’ Beazley.
Another great Stephen Kimber article! “NDP will set us free”
Bring it on Dexter!!
I’m a little concerned The Coast crowned Rodney before an election. Talk about wearing your politics on your front cover!
Oops..I meant crowned “Dexter”…Sheesh…Now you all are going to think that was a Freudian slip of types… 🙂
I find there has been a significant shift in direction from the NDP in recent years. Kimber has got it right; the NDP as a whole is less of the silver-spoon socialists, and much more pragmatic in it’s attitudes and policy. The policy is more like what the Liberals tabled 10 or 15 years ago, which is why it has become so populist. However, I don’t think that the NDP will have a majority. Although, I will be happy to see the Tories writhing around in third place.
I really like this article, because if there’s ANYTHING at this point that can stop a disasterous NDP majority destroying Nova Scotia it’s young NDP supporters who read the coast thinking they don’t need to bother voting because the dippers have it all locked up.
Yeah, I’m grasping at straws here, but when you see your Province about to head over a cliff you get like that.
Nice borderline slander, Fouge. The “boss” did not cover anything up; in fact Fage’s resignation ensued, as is to be expected. Kimber was very good to Dexter in this article. I guess that’s because Kimber is a self-professed member of the NDP party. Compare this article to his twisted negative one on MacDonald a couple of years back. Biased reporting; a cog in the media wheel that has worked to bring down MacDonald since he won the leadership as an underdog against the Halifax “South end” political and professional “establishment”. Ironic how a musician like you, Fouge, is speaking out against the only candidate for premier that has gone through similar challenges as a musician that you probably face…
It was a great story to read and I have learned more on the life of my cousin . Congradulations on your victory Darrell.
Kimber stop crying about what I said about the subjects you choose to reveal to the public in the emperors new clothes…My post was removed….that is called censorship ….do not be afraid to let reader’s think for themselves….by controlling the flow of information you are acting in a tyrannical manner.