- Record-Setting PC Campaign Built on Foundation of Houston’s Popularity: Campaign Co-Chairs MacKeen and Miller
By Avery Mullen
A dedicated media room to make the Progressive Conservative campaign more readily accessible to reporters and a “blue crew” of supporters who would travel from community to community door-knocking were among the factors that helped bolster the party’s record-setting electoral victory last year, campaign co-chairs Cameron MacKeen and Tara Miller said Saturday.
MacKeen, the son of noted Mulroney insider, David MacKeen, and Miller gave an election debrief at the luncheon event at the annual general meeting of the Progressive Conservative party. Typically, the lunch event in the past had featured a keynote address from a federal Conservative, but Premier Tim Houston has very much distanced himself from federal Tory leader, Pierre Poilievre.
When the PC’s won 43 seats in the legislature on Nov 26th, 2024, they bagged the largest ever majority in Nova Scotia history by seat count, rivalled only by a handful of other Tory wins in 1925, 1963, 1967 and 1984. The 1984 election was a third term win for Tory John Buchanan, when his PC party defeated then Liberal leader AM ‘Sandy Cameron, and that year the Liberals went from 12 seats to just a rump of six seats.
You can’t compare the size of Houston’s convincing win in 2024 to Buchanan because the seat count has increased. Buchanan won four historic back to back majorities.
MacKeen and Miller were the same two lawyers who led them to become the only party to dislodge an incumbent Canadian government during the pandemic in 2021, and yesterday they received the party’s President’s Award for their contributions.
Progressive Conservative campaign co-chairs Tara Miller and Cameron MacKeen speak at the party’a annual general meeting Saturday in the wake of leading the charge to form the largest Province House majority in Nova Scotia history.
MacKeen and Miller were speaking at the PCs annual general meeting, which was a victory lap for a party that overcame having spent much of the last decade languishing in third place at Province House. They said much of last year’s campaign built on Tim Houston’s deep popularity as premier — he began his second term in later November with a rare 55 per cent approval rating.
“The fact is, the most popular politician in Nova Scotia is Tim Houston — the most popular politician across every possible scenario,” said MacKeen. “We would have won this election no matter who was the prime minister in Ottawa because people liked Tim Houston.
“People in Nova Scotia liked Justin Trudeau more than Zach Churchill.”
MacKeen was referring to Liberal Party of Nova Scotia leader Zack Churchill because by last year, the party’s federal counterparts were polling as low as 16 percent at times, according to Angus Reid data. The provincial Liberals were defeated after nearly a decade in power in 2021, and last year, they performed so poorly they nearly lost official party status, winning just two seats.
“Another myth is that we won because of the federal government and the provincial Liberals’ position on the carbon tax,” said Miller. “Certainly that played a role, and for those of you that door-knocked, either as candidates or as volunteers, you heard that on the doorsteps. But … going back to what Cameron has said, the credibility that our party has in the leadership of the premier overwhelmingly was what people were responding to.
“The Liberal vote collapsed, and we got that vote.”
MacKeen heads up Nova Scotia Legal Aid’s Halifax South office, while Miller is a named partner at MDW Law and was previously senior counsel for Intact Insurance.
What differentiated 2024’s electoral bid, they said, was a recognition that traditional forms of campaigning, reliant on mainstream media to signal-boost political messaging, are no longer viable because major new outlets do not enjoy the audience-size and political sway they once held.
For example, MacKeen recalled how, when he was a Halifax Herald reporter in his younger years, working out of its now defunct Dartmouth News Bureau, news outlets would assign a journalist to follow each major political figure around the province during campaign season.
With budget cuts and diminished staffing at outlets ranging from the Chronicle Herald to the CBC, that approach is no longer viable because of a shortage of funding and journalists. Instead, the PCs created a media room in the back of a Salvation Army thrift store on Strawberry Hill Street in Halifax’s North End. With daily media briefings from Houston every morning, the facility was meant to give reporters easier access to cover announcements from the party leader without the additional cost and time involved in traveling outside of the city.
“The mainstream media isn’t as important as what they used to be,” said MacKeen. “We had all of our events basically in Halifax in a media ‘home,’ for lack of a better word. But we were able to get our message out without the media.
“We were able through social media — through a variety of press releases that we posted on social media. One of the most important examples of that is, everybody remembers the Sackville Heights elementary school situation on Remembrance day where the soldier wasn’t able to come in with his uniform. That was an example of how the mainstream media, for lack of a better word, isn’t as important. … We were able to have that statement put out within minutes, and that policy was changed basically before the mainstream media was aware of what was going on.”
MacKeen was referring to an elementary school in Lower Sackville that asked that current and former members of the armed forces not wear their uniforms to events out of deference to the “diverse makeup of (the) school community.” Houston’s campaign successfully lobbied for an abrupt reversal of that policy, saying administrators were “disgracing themselves.”
But one issue that had the potential to derail the PC’s campaign in the early days, MacKeen and Miller both acknowledged, was Houston’s decision to call an election almost a year ahead of schedule, despite having previously passed legislation that purported to require fixed election dates every four years.
The reason he called the election when he did, they said, was because he had fulfilled much of his initial mandate — which included promises related to reversing worrisome trends in healthcare — and was hesitant to embark on other initiatives, such as tax reform, without a fresh set of marching orders from voters.
“One part of it, that was actually one of the more ludicrous complaints about it from the Liberals, (was) when they talked about how the cost of the election would be $13 million,” said MacKeen. “Well guess what — that $13 million was going to be spent no matter what. And you may have actually saved money, because it’s done now, as opposed to seven or eight months from now.
“Because it was true, people understood that the premier wanted a new mandate. He had accomplished what he set out in his first mandate. And they understood that it was important, in order to continue to go forward, to let the voters decide.”
MacKeen and Miller were also honoured Saturday with the PC President’s Award, presented by party president David Bond.
“Leading up to (the 2024) election, governments across northern North America were falling, or returning with reduced seat counts as inflation and affordability concerns dominated the issues,” said Bond. “As we know, Cam and Tara would spearhead a campaign that resulted in the largest majority in Nova Scotia history. Throughout it all, they championed the idea that any success was a team success. In the best sense of leadership, they would listen first, weigh the options, set the course, and trust their team.”
