Two days after being elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Nova Scotia and Rodney MacDonald was still attracting national media attention. When sworn in, he will be the youngest Premier in Canada. While he has been around the provincial scene for a while, the national media know little of his policies or directions.
The National Post called AIMS president Brian Lee Crowley provide some perspective:
“I have often been disappointed at the unwillingness of Nova Scotia premiers to use their positions to speak to a national audience,” says Brian Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a Halifax think-tank.
“This is an important province. It’s not Ontario, but it’s got things to offer and to say to a national audience. Our leadership has been far too inward and insular in that sense.”
Mr. Crowley says that as the only premier under 40, Mr. MacDonald could play a unique role in Canada — not simply around the first ministers’ table, but in the country as a whole.
“If he can make himself an effective spokesman for the rising generation of young Canadians, I think he’d have a very powerful position,” he says.
“Every time we have an election, people always talk about how disengaged young people are and how the old white guys running the country just don’t relate to the younger generation. MacDonald is going to be the youngest premier by quite a stretch. This is a chance for him to establish himself as a national figure, to show young people that politics means something.”