Founding
The party was founded by Paul MacEwan, who had been an NDP member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly for ten years, 1970 to 1980. MacEwan was kicked out of the NDP in 1980, after allegedly calling party executive Dennis Theman a Trotskyite. MacEwan ran as an Independent, in the 1981 election and was re-elected by a strong margin. He took this as a mandate to set up a rival party.
The Cape Breton Labour Party was founded at a convention held in Glace Bay in the fall of 1982. MacEwan was elected its provincial leader. While at first the intent was to run candidates only on Cape Breton Island, due to the provisions of the Nova Scotia Elections Act, the party had to run candidates also in several mainland ridings to obtain recognition as a registered political party. The party's name was also changed to the Labour Party of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia at this time. In the end, a total of fourteen Labour candidates were run, eleven on Cape Breton and three on the mainland.
In the 1984 election, the 14 Labour candidates obtained a total of 8,322 votes. MacEwan was re-elected, with 3,832 votes. He thus became the first, and so far the only, candidate sponsored by a fourth political party to gain a seat in the Nova Scotia Legislature. Other Labour candidates were not elected, but managed to retain their deposits in the constituencies of Cape Breton East and Cape Breton Centre, while the NDP vote in those areas plunged to an all-time low in the same seats the party had held under Akerman.
After the 1984 election, MacEwan felt that the Labour Party could not continue, as insufficient funds had been raised to meet its minimum financial requirements. He ran in the next provincial election, held in 1988, as an Independent, and joined the Liberal Party in 1990.
Read more about this topic: Cape Breton Labour Party
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)