As part of Calgary Grit’s annual summer poll, I’ve offered to be the first round blog to establish the best Nova Scotian Premier. The winner will go on to face those from the 9 other provinces at Dan’s blog.
To make things manageable, I’ve only included the 10 longest-serving Premiers. We can have debates about the merits of using time as a qualifier, but history tends to reward those that stick around the longest, and so too will this contest. It actually works out pretty well, including a reasonable cross section across time and partisan affiliation. The cut off for inclusion worked out to be 5 years in office, rounding to the nearest year. The wrong side of the line includes two forgettable premiers that would later go on to be forgettable Prime Ministers in the gap between Macdonald’s death and Laurier’s election and Russell “15 seconds of silence” MacLellan.
Any how, my original plan had been to have a short bio for each (with snarky comments of my own added in), but the Deathly Hallows was a better read than I expected, and J.K. Rowling seems to be paid by the word. What evs’. In the meantime, wikipedia links will do, though I do recommend reading the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry for the older fellows- the link should be on their wiki page- as they are written by actual historians rather than nerds in their parents’ basement people like me. I will endeavor to have something up later tonight of my own creation.
Voting will be by rank, so feel free to set the order as you see fit. I’ll leave it to run until the end of the week. Remember, as with Nova Scotia politics in general, a certain amount of gerrymandering is expected, so: vote early and often.
The Candidates (by years served):
Angus L. Macdonald (1933-1940; 1945-54)
William S. Fielding (1884-1896)
Alexander S. MacMillan (1940-1945)
The poll itself can be found here.
