The Last Best Place by John Demont

forget our local rivalries and it is just us versus everyone else. American writer Dorothy Duncan couldn’t quite figure out the nationality of a man she met on a steamship from England bound for Halifax. “I’m a Nova Scotian,” allowed Hugh MacLennan, the Halifax novelist who four years later became her husband. In
Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia
she wrote: “He hadn’t said a ‘Canadian’ and he obviously didn’t think of himself as a Canadian. What could Nova Scotia be like, that its people gave this name to themselves with such pride in their voices that one felt they were convinced of a superiority palpable to the rest of the world?”
    This powerful loyalty touches everything. But nothing more than politics, Nova Scotia-style. This is high comedy and low cunning, payoffs and paving jobs, conspiracy and collusion. An old-time whiff of the rum bottle, a timeless hint of Tammany Hall. No different, I guess, from how things were a couple of centuries ago, after London ordered Gov. Charles Lawrence to create a legislative assembly for Nova Scotia. I sometimes imagine how politics was played back then: the partisan county sheriffs who let only voters supporting their candidates cast ballots, the “houses of entertainment” where thousands of pounds were spent plying voters with beds, food and booze, the merchants who jostled for power by forcing their debtors to vote for them, the local heavyweights who simply got together and selected candidates with the understanding that they would be uncontested on election day. “Where elections were fiercely contested, however,” historian Brian Cuthbertson wrote in his learned and amusing book
Johnny Bluenose at the
Polls: Epic Nova Scotian Election Battles 1758–1848
, “there could be much fraudulent voting, drunkenness, epic battles to gain possession of the passageways leading up to the hustings, intimidation of voters, and great expense to candidates.”
    The party in power made no difference. So ingrained was patronage that even Joseph Howe, the champion of responsible government, lobbied for political appointments. When Edgar Rhodes, a Tory, stepped into the premier’s office in 1925, he faced a pile of nearly two thousand unanswered letters and telegrams from people looking for work. Some of them read like this: “I am writing you to see if there is any possible chance of your giving me some kind of permanent position this year. There are seven Tory votes in my family, and we have always been good Tories, not people who have turned their coats at every election like some of our Tories in this town whenever they wanted a job. And it is pretty hard on a young fellow to be supporting a government that can’t do anything for him.” Or this: “I am a poor widow of ninety years of age. I am writing to ask you if you would be kind enough to send me a nice little check to last me through the long, cold winter. I have supported your government in the past.” Or the one that came from Dartmouth nearly a year after the election: “As this is 5 June, 1926, I’ve written your government asking for work and got no satisfaction. This is the last letter I intend writing. Now there are six voters in my home. We all worked and voted for the Conservatives at the last election … but I didn’t work for thanks. I want something for my husband, and if I don’t hear of anythingfrom you by the end of next week, I intend to work and vote for some other party that will give us work.”
    I do not want you to think badly of us. Animals, after all, look at each other a little funny when the water hole starts to dry up. Politics has always been more than a hobby in a place where prosperity, even survival, means allying yourself with the party in power. In Nova Scotia politics makes jobs magically materialize then disappear into thin air. It makes landlords rich and highways appear where only dirt roads once existed. It ruins careers and spawns men who seem stranger and larger