History Has Its Eyes on You
The change election is finally here, but which change do you want, and which change will we get?
Good morning and welcome to election day. The polls open at 8:30 a.m. and will close at 8:30 p.m. As the hours tick by, the choice of Canadians will gradually take shape, one ballot at a time, until we collectively make history, in one way or another.
Many of you have already voted.
Here’s how to track the results.
I will be in Saint John tonight. The riding is among the most emblematic of the issues and themes in this election. The story I did three weeks ago is here.
I was away for part of the past week. The CBC’s Aidan Cox did a couple of interesting stories on the military vote in the Fredericton-Oromocto riding and on how the outcome may affect harm-reduction policies meant to tackle addiction.
Mark Carney finally made it to New Brunswick for a campaign stop a week ago. He made no new province-specific commitments, but in P.E.I. he did promise lower tolls on the Confederation Bridge.
Beyond the 10 New Brunswick ridings to watch tonight, keep tabs on the Carleton riding in the Ottawa area. A faithful subscriber tells me Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy, taking on Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, has roots in Saint John.
‘All the way’ vs. ‘No-fly zones’
Premier Susan Holt’s internal-trade road show made a stop in St. John’s last week where she signed another memorandum of understanding on lowering interprovincial trade barriers.
I put together this analysis of Holt’s rhetoric on internal trade — “let’s go all the way” — and the important exceptions to this push, particularly for New Brunswick’s forestry sector, as Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey pointed out with his comment on “no-fly zones.”
All of this, was of course, great to chew on during this week’s Café politique and on the Shift New Brunswick political panel.
In other news
New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate released an important report about spending cuts on child welfare.
N.B. Power finally released that audit into supposedly anomalous January power bills; it concluded that the utility’s original explanation was largely correct.
We learned that the utility’s subsidies to forestry mills are going up again.
The company that was kicked off three major provincial bridge projects lost another round in court.
Let’s chat?
If you use the Substack app or website, I’ll try a bit of an experiment tonight by opening a live chat with subscribers. I’ve never done this before, I don’t know exactly how it will go, and it will be the seventh or eighth most important item on my list of things I have to do this evening. But I’ll try to answer good-faith questions as best I can. Otherwise, watch for me TV; I may have some live reports for our national election show.
Thank you as always for subscribing and for turning this into a reliable way of getting political news out to an interested audience. I’m starting to encounter people here and there who tell me they’re subscribers. That is very gratifying to know.
The polls are wrong. Conservative minority incoming.