P.E.I. Progressive Conservatives stay in power with decisive provincial election win (2023)

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CHARLOTTETOWN — Voters in Prince Edward Island delivered a decisive majority to the incumbent Progressive Conservatives on Monday after an election campaign dominated by debate over heath care.

With all polls reporting, Premier Dennis King’s Tories were elected in 22 of the province’s 27 ridings, the Liberals won three seats and the Greens two. The Conservatives captured 55.9 per cent of the popular vote, and King was easily re-elected in his riding of Brackley-Hunter River.

King’s first four years in office were marked by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, two major post-tropical storms and mounting health-care woes.

His party’s main challengers were the Green Party, led by Scottish-born dentist Peter Bevan-Baker, and the Liberals, led by former bureaucrat Sharon Cameron, who was acclaimed leader less than five months ago. She challenged Bevan-Baker in his riding and lost to him Monday.

At dissolution, the Conservatives held a slight majority with 15 seats. The Greens had eight seats, and the Liberals held four seats, having lost their majority to the Tories in 2019.

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The vote in April 2019 had seen P.E.I. become the first province in Canada where the Green Party formed the official Opposition.

Despite the Green breakthrough almost four years ago, political observers on the Island said the electorate did not appear to be in a mood for more change when the campaign began on March 6. And there were indications the party was not ready for an electoral contest. At one point, a former Green member of the legislature, Hannah Bell, said the party did not do enough planning or grassroots work.

The Greens nominated 25 candidates, two short of a full slate. The Liberals also fell short by the same margin.

Some observers said the Greens’ poor showing could also be attributed to inexperience. None of the Green members of the legislature had been elected in P.E.I. before 2015.

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On Monday night, Green volunteers at the Trailside Music Hall in Charlottetown fell silent as the results showed Green incumbents battling for their political lives.

Nate Hood, director of policy with the Greens, said he was hopeful the party would be able to hold on to some of its seats.

“There was a lot of talk at the start of the campaign that there potentially might be a clean sweep for the PCs,” Hood said. “I think we’ve grown some momentum in the campaign and I think we’ll see us hold a solid base of support.”

As the campaign started last month, King cited the challenges his party faced: two hurricane-force storms — Dorian in 2019 and Fiona last September — and the economic fallout caused by a potato fungus that halted exports of the Island’s most important crop.

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A former journalist and spokesman for former premier Pat Binns, King called the election six months before the province’s fixed election date, and less than two weeks after the province landed a 10-year health-care funding deal with Ottawa worth $966 million.

Don Desserud, a Prince Edward Island political analyst, said the Tory strategy was to ask voters to take note of their achievements in spite of the obstacles thrown in their way. He said it was as if King were saying: “If we can do that under those circumstances, imagine what we can do when we don’t have to deal with these crises.”

That message seemed to work at the doorstep.

Among other things, the Conservatives have promised to get every Islander off the provincial wait-list for a doctor in the next two years, expand the workforce to 90,000 jobs by 2026 and reduce building permit wait times to a maximum of 30 days by the end of the year.

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Desserud said it was a solid platform.

“I suspect that when … the house gets back together, they’re going to be much more aggressive on what they want to accomplish,” he said. “I think they’re going to have a much bigger vision than they’ve had before.”

As expected, health care was the focus of a televised leaders debate on March 27, during which King was on the defensive. As he did during the previous election campaign, King responded to his opponents’ attacks by remaining optimistic and collegial.

“There are some wonderful ideas in the other three party platforms,” King said during the remarkably tame event.

Still, Bevan-Baker accused King of failing Islanders on health care. “Let’s remember who created the problems in the first place: it’s the old parties,” Bevan-Baker said.

The Liberal platform was heavily focused on health-care, promising a seven-point plan to be implemented during the party’s first 180 days in office.

The New Democrats were never a factor in the race, and they finished with just 4.5 per cent of the vote, compared with 21.6 per cent for the Greens and 17.2 per cent for the Liberals.

— With additional reporting from Michael MacDonald in Halifax and Teresa Wright in Charlottetown