New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham walks away from the podium after addressing supporters at the Curling Club in Rexton, New Brunswick September 27, 2010.PAUL DARROW/Reuters
Incumbent governments across Canada can draw three lessons from the current political mood, put in sharp relief by Shawn Graham's historic failure to win a second term as premier of New Brunswick.
The struggling economy is still the number-one concern of many voters, though "fixing" it is beyond any government's remit. David Alward, the Conservative leader, ran a pocketbook campaign that included freezing electricity rates and taming excessive property-tax increases. It may not be ideal fiscal policy, but a savvy government intent on political survival has motives for offering new pocketbook inducements, at a sufficiently low overall cost. Simply standing pat and proclaiming sound management will not work.
Every governing party in Canada should evaluate its relationship to the electorate. A failure to lay the groundwork for policy changes helps explain Mr. Graham's demise. With little advance warning, he proposed during his mandate the sale of the provincial energy utility to Hydro-Québec, and a reorganization of French immersion education - changes that struck at the heart of New Brunswick political culture. While he later backtracked in whole or in part, Mr. Graham never secured the buy-in necessary to win support for either idea, and more New Brunswickers viewed him as weak or untrustworthy as a result. (Mr. Alward and his candidates delivered this message with great effectiveness in their door-knocking campaign.)
Some might say that the first two lessons imply governing parties should be cautious and defensive. But there is a good case to be made for the opposite. There is increasing talk of "Tea Party-lite" tendencies in Canada - of voters sick of government that is in their faces but doesn't work, voters willing to embrace a new, conservative populism.
To the extent that that mood may be out there - and its reach is, at this point, unclear - it would be a mistake to conclude that voters are simply ready to think small. It does show that they are ready to be inspired by clear messages.
A big and new vision, connected to policies that people can imagine benefiting from, combined with investments in a grassroots campaigning apparatus, ought to be the new recipe for incumbent governments preparing for re-election. Few leaders or incumbent parties have the boldness or imagination to try this.
But it can be done. Brian Mulroney turned free trade with the United States into the ballot box issue of the 1988 election, and won. If Mr. Graham had campaigned on his proposed electricity and education changes, with a grand narrative that linked them and his vision of Liberalism together, the outcome could have been quite different.
Mr. Graham is the first elected New Brunswick Premier since Confederation to fail to secure re-election after his first term. If that province is ready to cast aside 150 years of political history, there's a new political calculus at work across the land.