By Andrew Macdonald
With Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative leader Tim Houston calling a snap election for Nov. 26 in his third term of government, NDP stalwart Dan O’Connor recently wrote to party partisans about his political experiences with snap elections.
“I’ve been through snap election campaigns before. The governing party starts with a big advantage, but it doesn’t have to stay that way,” O’Connor said in his message.
O’Connor is co-chair of campaign efforts for NDP leader Claudia Chender.
O’Connor was chief of staff in the 1980s to the late, great NDP leader Alexa McDonough. In that era, Tory leader John Buchanan called several snap elections , in both 1981 and 1984and won four straight back-to-back majorities.
Current Tory leader Houston has publicly said his political hero is ‘Honest It’s John’ Buchanan, although Buchanan bankrupted the province, and operated a government that rewarded party supporters with lots of goodies. Cronyism was the order of the day in Buchanan’s regime.
Dan O’Connor in February 2023. He served as NDP Darrell Dexter’s chief of staff. The Notebook photo
O’Connor was a senior political aide in the Darrell Dexter government.
In his recent dispatch to NDPers, O’Connor said Houston has been planning for a snap election, and “knew Houston would announce he was breaking his promise of a fixed-date election. He broke his promise to fix health care. He broke his promises of affordable housing and coastal protection. The Tories hope a snap election will let them get away with it.
“We may be at a disadvantage, but we can’t let their underhanded politics win,” O’Connor told NDP members. “We have to fight back, even on short notice. That’s why I am calling on all grassroots supporters: make your contribution of five dollars or more before tomorrow’s deadline!”
O’Connor Knows The Importance Of Strong Campaign Strategy
By Avery Mullen
As Nova Scotians go to the ballot box Nov. 26, the province’s NDP will do so with a key architect of the one-time Darryl Dexter government still in their corner: Dan O’Connor.
Now a 40-year veteran of the NDP, much of which he spent as chief of staff to party leaders and premiers at both the provincial and federal levels, O’Connor is no longer on the party payroll, but he continues to preside over its campaign preparations as co-chair of the election planning committee.
Seven years ago, journalist and public relations specialist Jordi Morgan interviewed O’Connor on his podcast, titled Fall Back Up. In the hour-long discussion, O’Connor offers a rare window into his thoughts and experiences from decades spent among the NDPs top brass.
“There was a little going away party where I said, ‘I blame it all on my father,’” recalled O’Connor, describing his retirement. “My father took a huge interest in current events, in politics, and trained my brother and I to follow the news, to be able to talk about it at supper every night. I just took to it.”
After a childhood spent in Ontario, O’Connor arrived in Nova Scotia at 17 to attend St. Francis Xavier University, going on to earn a law degree from Dalhousie. His first job with the New Democrats was not in Nova Scotia, however, but in Ottawa.
There, he cut his teeth as a researcher for federal MP David Orlikow in 1978 and 1979, becoming the first person on staff to write a speech that Orlikow was actually willing to use.
“I was just living my little Ottawa life, doing the job — unhappy on Parliament Hill because the job was so undemanding,” recalls O’Connor. “It was a nine-to-five job, and you couldn’t possibly find any way to keep filling it beyond that because there was nothing left to do. The staff were, to my mind, compared to my student movement work, incredibly under-worked.”
Unbeknownst to O’Connor at the time, the quality of the speech he had written convinced Orlikow to lobby for him to be appointed chief of staff to Manitoba NDP leader Howard Pawley. And when Pawley became premier in 1981, O’Connor stayed on.
“I was the only non-secretarial staffer,” O’Connor says. “There was a half-time constituency assistant, one secretary on permanent medical leave, and two other secretaries. So the MLAs had to do almost all of the research and work themselves.
“I was focused on the leader, but it was an absolutely great team. It was an early lesson that, as an American politician consultant years later said, any successful enterprise is going to have a group of five or six people at the core who work well with each other, understand each other, and know what the mission is.”
When O’Connor returned to Nova Scotia to work for Alexa McDonough, he recalls finding a provincial party that in many ways resembled the Manitoba NDP. For example, he told interviewer Morgan, both organizations were shaped by long stretches of time languishing as relatively unpopular ‘third parties’, but also present in both parties was a culture that recognized the importance of building a core group of skilled people.
McDonough herself was a political outsider, a social worker who had become the first woman in Canada to lead a major provincial party. In O’Connor’s eyes, that was one of her core strengths.
“She was the fresh voice bringing sanity to Nova Scotia politics,” O’Connor says. “And that clearly struck home, most of all, with people born elsewhere who would, back in those days, come here and say, ‘What the hell is this?’”
But it was during the tenure of another NDP premier, Darrell Dexter, that O’Connor received an object lesson in exactly how much his team’s approach to politics differed from the Atlantic Canadian norm.
In 2012, Dexter agreed to loan $304 million to Irving Shipbuilding to prepare to build 15 new warships for the Canadian Navy. O’Connor, who had continued to move between senior roles in federal and provincial politics and eventually joined Dexter’s team while the party was still in opposition, saw the deal as a win for the NDP.
Irving did not believe it would be capable of winning the navy contract and building the warships without expensive preparation work, meaning the economic benefits of the warship contract could flow to another province. And if the Irving shipyard lost the navy bid, it was likely to close.
“The shipyard deal is just the thing that a provincial government should do, from the point of view of social democrats,” says O’Connor. “Without provincial government involvement, there was no hope of winning the bid. Because that shipyard exists only because of provincial government equity investment right back to when (previous owner) Hawkey Siddeley walked away.”
When the provincial government announced the funding, though, the public was not told how instrumental government backing was to the future of the shipyard. Instead, the province issued a boilerplate press release that unintentionally inflamed public sentiment and potentially contributed to Dexter being ousted after just one term in office.
Alexa McDonough, centre, and Dan O’Connor, at Nova Scotia’s NDP convention in February 2020, listen to Margie MacDonald to whom they had presented a lifetime membership.
The broader problem that O’Connor believes scuppered Dexter’s reelection hopes was a focus on policy making and governance at the expense of campaign planning — an area in which he even today continues to volunteer his efforts. Another senior NDP official would later tell O’Connor some members of the Dexter administration believed “the governing strategy was the re-election strategy.”
The team’s focus on policy over optics was perhaps foreshadowed by O’Connor’s father during those early dinner-table chats about current events, during which he says the conversation entirely eschewed partisan retail politics in favour of a more policy-focused lens.
Wlliam O’Connor and his dad, Dan, three years ago working an election in London, Ont. William has campaigned for the NDP across Canada, and is now working in the Manitoba premier’s office. O’Connor Family Photo
O’Conner, though, learned from the experience: “Communication, of course, is always two-way. The government needs to provide the information, and it needs to hear back when people have the information. I still think this province can be much better.”
Alexa McDonough speaking at Dan O’Connor and Sharon Fraser’s wedding reception in May 1988. Dan is behind the balloon, and Sharon is in the white dress.
The 1971 yearbook at Saint Francis Xavier University captures a young Dan O’Connor. He ran and briefly won a student union presidency election against opponent Reg Rankin.
