Painted Tory blue
Published Wednesday October 15th, 2008
Election Conservatives take most seats in New Brunswick since Mulroney landslide of 1984
Conservative supporters painted more than half of New Brunswick blue last night for the first time in 25 years.
The Conservative party won six seats of the province's 10 federal seats, a gain of three, as voters turfed out Liberal incumbents in Saint John and Miramichi and chose a Conservative to succeed retiring Liberal MP Andy Scott in Fredericton.
The final count: Conservatives six, Liberals three, NDP one.
The victor in the capital - former Progressive Conservative MLA Keith Ashfield - sensed the momentum during the campaign.
"You never know, but I have been treated a lot worse at the doors over the years and still won elections," he said during the celebration at his headquarters.
"This time, people treated me very well."
Not since Brian Mulroney's landslide victory of 1984, when they won nine seats in the province, have the Conservatives held most of New Brunswick's ridings.
For two Liberals, incumbency granted no immunity from voters unimpressed by the campaign run by Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.
Down to defeat went veteran Miramichi Liberal MP Charlie Hubbard, handily beaten by schoolteacher Tilly O'Neill-Gordon of the Conservatives.
Hubbard had held the riding since 1993.
"I'm excited, I'm happy and I'm ready to get to work for all the people of the Miramichi," said O'Neill-Gordon.
In Saint John, another Conservative challenger, Rodney Weston, triumphed over Liberal MP Paul Zed, who had held the seat since 2004.
"I can certainly see a national trend against the position of our party and I understand that," Zed said. "The reality is Saint John is a winner" because the community had united behind several projects in the past four years, he said.
There wasn't one specific turning point, but this week the campaign felt good, said Weston.
"It was a battle right from the start. We knew it was going to be," said Weston, whose exuberant supporters chanted "Rodney, Rodney" as he entered his headquarters just minutes after Zed conceded defeat.
Saint John's outcome was a case of the riding returning to its roots; Tory Elsie Wayne held the seat from 1993 to 2004.
Zed also said the Liberal message suffered from what he called "American-style" negative campaigning by the Conservatives.
Weston's victory was one of three ways Conservative strength in this federal election was a legacy of the Bernard Lord government.
Weston was an MLA in Lord's first term and then his chief of staff.
Ashfield was Lord's minister of natural resources.
He won handily as the centre-left of the political spectrum split between the Liberals, NDP and Green Party.
And in Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe, Conservative candidate Daniel Allain, Lord's former executive assistant, put up a strong showing in a nail-biter eventually won by Liberal incumbent Brian Murphy, Moncton's former mayor.
Murphy defiantly pointed to the massive effort by the Harper campaign to defeat him, which included a rally with all 10 Conservative candidates.
"This is a Liberal riding and it will stay a Liberal riding," said Murphy. "It was close, but we held strong."
A steady rain outside Hubbard's headquarters matched the mood inside as, the outcome apparent, glum supporters stopped posting numbers.
"It looks like we're losing - not that it's never happened before," said Hubbard, who was the only MP from Atlantic Canada to support Stephane Dion's leadership bid early on in 2006.
In Madawaska-Restigouche, Liberal MP Jean-Claude D'Amours trounced his Conservative opponent Jean-Pierre Ouellet in a bitter rematch between the two.
Last time out, D'Amours had won by just 885 votes in the second-closest race in the province.
Of all the seats in New Brunswick, Fredericton was seen at the outset of the campaign as the one to watch.
Scott had held it for 15 years and five election victories, but announced in the spring of 2007 that he would retire after the next election.
That made Scott the only incumbent in the province to not reoffer - but that wasn't the only reason his departure left the riding up for grabs.
Scott had turned a formerly Tory riding into his own by building support across the political spectrum.
It was no surprise that both Harper and Dion staged quick rallies in Fredericton on the final weekend of the campaign.
There were signs the Liberals sensed trouble even before the campaign began.
Soon after Dion announced his Green Shift carbon policy in June, it ran into opposition among rural Atlantic Canadians and the trucking, farming and fishing industries.
The Graham government wasn't cheering for the policy, either.
In early September, the Liberals sweetened the policy with hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits for farmers, fishermen and truckers.
It wasn't enough.
In August, a Corporate Research Associates poll found 49 per cent of New Brunswickers opposed to the Green Shift; a follow-up poll in September pegged opposition even higher, at 51 per cent.
The Green Shift was also an issue in Saint John, where Zed and the Liberals stumbled in their efforts to convince voters the Irving Oil refinery would not be affected.
In Acadie-Bathurst, the lone NDP MP in the province, Yvon Godin, won by a wide margin.
First elected in 1997, Godin has won five straight elections and developed a strong reputation as a hard-working constituency MP.
"I think the difference in this campaign was that I didn't need to make myself known. People know me here. I haven't been hiding for the past eleven years," Godin told reporters at a celebration in Tracadie-Sheila.
As expected, Conservative MPs Greg Thompson, who first won office in 1988, lost in 1993 and has now won five elections in a row, and Rob Moore in Fundy Royal, the MP since 2004, won handily.
Fundy Royal is one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.
Thompson's supporters hollered when every Tory candidate popped up on television, many in the lead.
Said Thompson, who has served as minister of Veterans Affairs: "We have demonstrated the ability to work with the province of New Brunswick "¦ and my philosophy is you achieve more by working together and that is the type of co-operation we have shown."
Dion was in Saint John and Harper in Fredericton the first week of the campaign; both returned to stage rallies in Moncton and Dieppe with 10 days to go, then both dropped into Fredericton on the final weekend.
NDP leader Jack Layton did not come to New Brunswick.
The Progressive Conservatives won five seats in both 1988 election and the 1997 election.
In each of the last two elections, only one seat in New Brunswick changed hands.
In the election of 2006 it was Tobique-Mactaquac, which had been held by the Liberals since 2000 but went Conservative, giving the party three seats in the province.
In the 2004 election, Zed's victory in Saint John gave the Liberals seven seats in the province.
Election night, Mike Allen was looking ahead to what the next Parliament will bring.
"No matter what happens "¦ the party will have a couple-year window to undertake their platform," he said, calling on the opposition parties to "to make things work because we're in tough economic times."
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Well Mr. Zed your still out of touch. Every election campaign has negative attack ads. Your party had its fair share. This has nothing to do with why you lost. You lost because of your leader and the green shift. The liberal party was out of touch, evidence of which could be seen in the rest of Canada.