Politics

With four Liberal premiers in Atlantic Canada, and all 32 federal seats held by Liberals, the four Opposition provincial leaders have formed a joint body, the Atlantic Opposition Leaders, to advocate for the region.

The region’s Opposition leaders are all Progressive Conservatives, and a chief architect of the joint group is Nova Scotia Tory leader Jamie Baillie, who last spring came near defeating the Liberal government of Stephen McNeil.

The Nova Scotia Coalition for Small Business Tax Fairness, groups that joined the Canadian Federation of Independent Business lobby against the Trudeau government’s tax changes for small business operators includes the following organizations:

Andrew Murray, a gay politician in Antigonish, has a dream to have more gay councillors in rural Nova Scotia.

The 54-year-old broke through significant barriers in Antigonish’s municipal election in 2016, becoming the first out gay man to win a council seat in a town long controlled by Catholics.

In the mid 1990s, the recently departed Allan J. MacEachen sat on the St. Francis Xavier University board of governors.

Trudeau cabinet minister Scott Brison paid tribute to Allan J. MacEachen, during a speech to Halifax Port Days this past week:

“This week Canada and Nova Scotia lost a giant. Allan J. MacEachen.

Back in 1985, the Halifax Herald’s then Ottawa bureau chief Don MacDonald wrote a weekly gossip column that was a must read.

One column in 1985 featured a blurb about how Allan J MacEachen would take his own special bread into Ottawa restaurants, including the Parliamentary dining room, and would ask the wait staff to toast it for him.

No politician, other than a prime minister, has ever come close in the postwar period to the power that Allan J. MacEachen dispensed.

As Pierre Trudeau’s Foreign Affairs minister, Allan J. MacEachen globe-trotted around the world.

The son of an Inverness coal minister, was particularly fond of his travels throughout Scotland.

Leading Halifax-Dartmouth corporate lawyer John Young served as a political aide to Allan J. MacEachen in the mid-1970s.

Tactician. Wily. Strategist. Laird of Lake Ainslie. Lord of Cape Breton. The Second coming of Christ.

Those words were often used from the 1960s to early 1980s by political journalists of the day to describe the political life of Allan J. MacEachen.