Cape Breton Labour Party
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The Cape Breton Labour Party was a social democratic provincial political party in Nova Scotia, Canada that advocated seperate provincial status for Cape Breton[1] , which is the northern part of the Province of Nova Scotia.
The party was founded by Paul MacEwan, who had been an NDP Member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly for ten years, 1970 to 1980.
MacEwan was first elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly October 13, 1970, and was re-elected in 1974 and 1978. In 1980, his longtime associate Jeremy Akerman resigned as party leader, after taking the party from being shut out of the Legislature completely in the 1960s to holding four seats in the House, all from industrial Cape Breton, after 1978. By 1980 Akerman was the most senior NDP provincial leader in Canada.
When Akerman announced his pending retirement, MacEwan was asked what had caused this, and speculated that the reading recommendations of party executive Dennis Theman may have been part of the cause. Theman, in a published article, had recommended subscription to a Toronto paper "Forward for the NDP and Socialism," which MacEwan considered a Trotskyite publication.
A media uproar followed, in which it was held that MacEwan's words had ammounted to calling Theman a Trotskyite. He was placed on trial by the provincial NDP executive, and expelled from the party, on seven disciplinary charges. None of these accused MacEwan of having called Theman any name, but rather accused MacEwan of creating a Cape Breton-mainland split within the party, as well as a party-caucus division.
MacEwan was neither present nor represented at his trial. An appeal of the expulsion to the provincial NDP council proved unsuccessful, despite MacEwan's claim that the motive propelling the expulsion was the fear by many Halifax NDPers that if he was left in the party as a member, he would seek the party leadership that Akerman had vacated.
MacEwan felt that beyond this the issue at stake was freedom of speech and that all party members should be free to express their opinions on anything done in the name of the party. The Theman reading recommendations had been published in the party newspaper, "The Nova Scotia New Democrat."
MacEwan put his case to his constituents, asking for their judgment on what had happened, in the 1981 provincial election. Running as an Independent, he polled 3,691 votes, to 173 polled by an official NDP candidate running against him. MacEwan considered this a mandate for the setting up of a rival party, if peace could not be made with the NDP.
The Cape Breton Labor Party was founded at a convention held in Glace Bay in the fall of 1982. MacEwan was elected its provincial leader. While at first the intent was to run candidates only on Cape Breton Island, due to the provisions of the Nova Scotia Elections Act, the party had to run candidates also in several mainland ridings to obtain recognition as a registered political party. The party's name was also changed to the Labor Party of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia at this time. In the end, a total of fourteen Labor candidates were run, eleven on Cape Breton and three on the mainland.
The 14 Labor candidates obtained a total of 8,322 votes. MacEwan was re-elected, with 3,832 votes to 674 for an official NDP candidate opposing him. He thus became the first, and so far the only, candidate sponsored by a fourth political party to gain a seat in the Legislature. Other Labor candidates were not elected, but managed to retain their deposits in the constituencies of Cape Breton East and Cape Breton Centre, while the NDP vote in those areas plunged to an all-time low in the same seats the party had held under Akerman. But the party's officials in Halifax remained unpersuaded that they had anything to gain to repair the rift.
The main issues in contention between the Labor Party and the NDP centered on how the party was to be run and in what direction. MacEwan maintained that freedom of speech was important in politics and that elected representatives should be free to represent their constitutents as they best determined. The Halifax NDP, led by Alexa McDonough throughout this period, emphasized established party policy and expected MLAs to subscribe to this first before formulating their opinions on issues.
Much of the tussle was over geography, and whether Cape Breton, or downtown Halifax, should be in control of operations. The Halifax NDP claimed that the Labor Party was "separatist," but never identified how. There is no mention found advocating any constitutional change for Cape Breton Island in the advertising run by the Labor Party in the 1984 election. The party issued a multi-point election platform, but its contents were confined to such traditional Cape Breton issues as "proper" levels of government support for the coal and steel industries, a higher minimum wage, reform of Workers Compensation, and improvements to highways.
The dispute was accentuated by bad personal relations between MacEwan and the new NDP provincial leader, Alexa McDonough, each viewing the other as unworthy. MacEwan considered that McDonough had encouraged his expulsion from the NDP for political advantage, and had gained the NDP leadership by intrigue. Each was inclined to criticize the other publicly, McDonough depicting MacEwan as an unrepentent enemy of all the NDP stood for, while MacEwan described McDonough and her father, industrialist Lloyd Shaw, as seeking to use their wealth to try and prevent democracy in Nova Scotian politics.
After the 1984 election, MacEwan felt that the Labor Party could not continue, as insufficient funds had been raised to meet its minimum financial requirements. He ran in the next provincial election, held in 1988, as an Independent, and joined the Liberal Party in 1990.
After the Liberals formed the provincial government in 1993, Paul MacEwan was elected Speaker of the House, and served from 1993 to 1996. Afterwards he served for a time as Government House Leader, and was Chair of the Committee on Private and Local Bills. Later on, he served as Deputy Government House Leader and party Whip. When the Liberals lost power in 1999, he continued to serve as Whip, Deputy House Leader, and critic for the Department of Labor and Workers Compensation Board. He was noted for constituency service more than anything else, and took on additional Workers Compensation and Canada Pension Plan appeals almost continuously over his years in politics.
MacEwan suffered two cerebral aneurysms in 2001, and declined to seek re-election at the 2003 provincial election on grounds of health. He resigned from the Assembly after 33 years of continuous service under three different party labels and as an independent, having won nine consecutive elections, and giving the longest continuous service of anyone in the history of the Nova Scotia Legislature.
