October 30, 2024
On the eve of an election, remembering when liquor was king
I could tell by the political booklets and brochures in my post office box, a box that generally specializes in flyers and NS Power bills, that Nova Scotia was revving up for an election.
A couple of days later, the premier paid a visit to the lieutenant governor. That was either because they were both going on a drunk together, or the premier was going to ask for a Halloween treat, which he got. Not everyone knocking on your door tomorrow night will be kids pretending to be monsters. The knock may turn out to be far scarier than that, vote-beggars bumming your X on a coming ballot.
So, no drunk for the premier or the lieutenant governor. But the thought makes me nostalgic.
Whenever a Nova Scotia election is called, I find myself wondering where all that liquor has gone…all that liquor that used to be the vote-buying currency of earlier elections.
Growing up through the eras of Angus L. and Stanfield and a few other premiers, it seemed to be the easiest time to be a town drunk in Inverness. Street corner panhandling, the natural employment for the whiskey and wine crowd, moved closer towards the Liberal and Progressive Conservative headquarters.
These were guys who were no longer looking for charity from their neighbours and friends. They were now entrepreneurs with something to sell. Their vote.
Many political organizers felt a pint of this, a quart of that, was a good investment in their candidate’s future. Of course, those who now had something to sell thought nothing of selling it twice. The Liberals and the Tories, unaware of the corporate shenanigans of these two-timing political supporters, believed the price of a bottle was a small price to pay for a sure vote.
With a bottle in each of their arse pockets, this particular voting demographic slipped out of sight into the buckwheat below the pay office (later a classroom, later a dance hall, later the Cabot Trail Tavern/The Hoff, and currently Mill Road Enterprises).
Come Election Day, there were search parties from both parties beating the buckwheat bushes for inebriated voters. They would be herded to the nearest polling booth, obviously the pay office cum classroom…oh, you that building’s history…to cast their bought and paid for (twice) vote.
The nuisance about democracy for the politically active is that those people who brought these elusive voters to the polling stations weren’t allowed to accompany them to into the privacy of the voting booth itself. They just had to trust that these voters could read the ballot, mark an X beside the name they were bribed to vote for, and leave.
I had on one occasion the dubious duty of being a party representative at the pay office polling station. When the voting ended, we gathered, Tory and Liberal and a very lonely NDP representative. The big news that night was that at our poll, the NDP vote totalled 2.
Now this was an issue of interest to all of us, Two NDP votes! Okay, everybody there knew who cast one of the votes, because before there was an NDP party there was the CCF party, and there was one person in the neighbourhood who always cast the town’s sole CCF vote. So, he was the town’s known ‘communist.’
But who cast that second vote? Speculation was high.
It could accidentally have been one of the residents of the Buckwheat neighbourhood. There were a number of ballots that were spoiled by unsteady hands, other ballots ruined by an X that sprawled across the entire page, and some ballots that spoke of the integrity of the buckwheat voters who carefully placed an X beside each of the candidates on the ballot that had handed them a bottle.
Compared to their sloppy penmanship, though, the X placed beside the second NDP vote was precise and deliberate. No possibility of a mistake. The evidence was clear. The NDP had doubled their vote at that polling station. What did this mean for the future of the town?
This coming election will be essentially liquor-free instead of free liquor, and the candidates who do come knocking…well, who will they be?
Between the major provincial parties, at least 10 MLAs have announced they will not be re-offering for their parties in the coming election. This is never good news for political leaders who need to find potentially electable replacements. This may mean making phone calls to party-friendly men or women that end with the leader saying “Please, please, please run for the party!”
Or it may mean going down to the buckwheat bushes, rattling a box of unopened bottles, pleading, “Please, please, please, it’s not like I’m asking you to take a real job...”
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