Final update: The Green Party’s Matt MacFarlane ended up being the vehicle for the protest vote, totals coming in at just under 50%. The PCs were able to retain close to 2/3rds of their 2021 share at just under 40%, but this was clearly a protest vote against the King government in Charlottetown, who at last polling still remained fairly popular province-wide and still enjoys a majority of 7 in the 27 seat legislature. The one takeaway is when provincial Liberals have interim leaders (as was also the case during the Kitchener byelection last November), and the NDP are not particularly strong, Greens tend to perform well, very well, in recent byelections, suggesting some measure of long-term staying power. This ironically could help Premier King, however, as the opposition is now even between 3 Liberal and 3 Green, both parties with interim leaders and tied in the polls, a divided an opposition as it could ever get, more so than in Ontario and Quebec where for the past several years the incumbent Premiers also enjoyed a divided opposition with no apparent government-in-waiting. The other takeaway is that while Newfoundland and Labrador and Northern Ireland remain the most challenging areas to predict between the three countries I follow, PEI, (and Yukon) are not far behind. But even with two incorrect predictions in a row with Atlantic Canada byelections under my belt, the delving into the fascinating political dynamics and history of unique places and regions make this as rewarding an endeavour as ever.
Update: After two days of postponement due to weather, a report showed large accumulations of snow across the island, coupled with high winds. The Crapaud area in the eastern part of the riding received a total of 34 cm between last Friday, February 2nd and yesterday morning, Tuesday, February 6th, with some other areas of the province receiving twice as much. The PEI 511 website currently shows that main roads, i.e. Route 1 are now bare as of Wednesday afternoon, at least where the riding proper is concerned. It remains to be seen if the weather will have a noticeable effect on voter turnout (and potentially on the overall outcome in the event of a close vote.)
This seat opened up after the PC incumbent, Jamie Foxx, resigned last November to run for the Conservative Party of Canada nomination for the federal riding of Malpeque. Foxx had previously served in cabinet as well as interim party leader. The riding has a blueish lean with Foxx’s first election in 2015 in opposition to the Liberal Wade McLaughlin government.
The byelection is against the backdrop of a popular PC Premier, Dennis King and his government, considerably ahead in polling over the Greens and Liberals.
Primary issues for the province as a whole include health care, including the patient registry (waiting lists), and the establishment of a medical school at the University of Prince Edward Island, housing, and overall affordability.
The riding is perhaps best known for being the PEI terminus of the 12.9 km (8.0 mile) Confederation Bridge, the road link between PEI and New Brunswick which opened in 1997. The largest community in the riding is Borden-Carleton. Historically Borden has been the link between PEI and the mainland with ferry service and much of the local history and economy of the town was influenced by transportation to and from the mainland.
Indeed, PEI politics as a whole was often influenced by the prospect of a physical connection to the mainland. (see J. Watson MacNaught, Pearson Liberals wiped out in PEI 1965 election despite promises to build a causeway, Peter Newman, The Distemper of Our Times, p. 76) The causeway had been an issue for over a century before a 1988 plebiscite decided in favour of construction of the bridge, roughly 60% favouring it to 40% opposed, in some quarters still seen as a contentious issue.
The main issues in the current byelection however are not transportation but healthcare, housing and education, and despite not having lost a byelection since his election in 2019, Premier King risks losing the riding to residents upset over the scaling back of services at Prince County Hospital in nearby Summerside, as well as the lack of affordable housing and school overcrowding in the Kinkora area.
The PC candidate Carmen Reeves agrees that more must be done to restore health care services, touting the government’s decision to construct the medical school and thereby ensuring a more ready supply of doctors and health care workers in the province, although his opponents have been critical of the decision to assign waitlists (patient registry) to medical homes and failures to recruit needed health care personnel.
Liberal candidate Gordon Sobey, former President of the PEI Federation of Agriculture, might be the candidate most likely to flip the riding, although Green Candidate Matt McFarlane has also been critical of the government’s response by building a medical school, calling it a ‘zero solution’ to fix the immediate shortages of health care. NDP Candidate Karen Morton has also been critical of the government’s approach and in a recent interview urged the government to listen to all sides.
Takeaways from the byelection might effectively be a warning sign for the King government to show voters more readily perceived results in healthcare; as well as establishing a more discernable Official Opposition, whether that is Liberal or Green (both of whom currently have interim leaders), depending on who either comes in a strong second or upsets the race; and even a possible warning sign to the federal Conservatives that while Atlantic Canada might be trending blue federally, like the more surprise result in Conception Bay East – Bell Island last week, not to discount local issues and take anything for granted.
Historically the Borden-Kinkora riding was largely 4th Prince, a dual member riding electing both Assemblymen and Councillors concurrently between joining Confederation in 1873 and its reorganization to the current area beginning in 1996. This area has been traditionally more of a bellwether provincially, with some instances of voting Liberal for the one office and Conservative for the other concurrent office. Federally this area has been in the Prince riding before placement in the current Malpeque riding starting in 1968, an area of the province with overall strong Liberal leanings, (Prince being one of the few English Canadian seats to buck the ferry’s landing namesake*, Robert Borden and his Unionist sweep in 1917, for example), more recently the seat being Liberal uninterruptedly since 1988.
*Borden, PEI was so named in 1919, after the Prime Minister. To make the 1917 voting in Prince even more interesting was that the new port was commissioned and ferry service established at that point the very same year and still the riding voted against the federal government of the day. One wishes to have had the individual polling station results at the time.