The voters of Newfoundland and Labrador will have plenty of chance to express their voices in October. But the politicians on offer in two sets of elections are covering their ears to those voices. It’s only big business whose words count.
Municipal elections will take place in cities and towns across the province on October 2, while the election of 40 members to the provincial House of Assembly will be on October 14, which is the latest possible date Premier John Hogan — potentially fearful for his Liberal Party’s chances after 10 years in power — could hold the provincial vote.
For weeks, Hogan and his underlings made the usual flurry of high-profile pre-election photo-ops across the province. As is typical with a Liberal Party, provincial or federal (Prime Minister Mark Carney’s being a new and significant exception), they sought to impress with relatively “left” new pledges and ribbon cuttings. One event was at a new mental health treatment centre near Holyrood, while other announcements included a bailout of an allegedly renewable energy company in Come by Chance to the tune of $25 million and an overpriced energy purchase from a paper mill in Corner Brook.
Liberals back oil and gas
Regardless of their patchwork of renewable energy promises, the Liberals, much like their federal counterparts, have in fact been huge backers of the oil and gas industry. Their April 2025 budget pledged $90 million for offshore oil exploration and $20 million more for energy business development. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are also praying for forward motion on development of the massive Bay du Nord oil field, proposed for 500 kilometres off Newfoundland’s east coast. Norwegian company Equinor has delayed the first steps of this unprecedented project since 2023, and though they now hope to have oil pumping by 2031, there’s no firm guarantee that Canada’s first deep-sea oil platforms will ever be built.
Energy is saturating the provincial campaign. “The election issue,” Hogan says, will be a proposed new memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Québec for electricity generated at the Churchill Falls hydroelectric station in Labrador. This MOU would replace a 1969 deal between the provinces, with the Liberals saying they’ve negotiated the best possible deal for Newfoundland and Labrador and the Tories demanding a redo, claiming they could wring more money out of Québec. Home electricity prices for working-class people in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t the concern (never mind for those in Quebec also straining to keep the light and heat on), at least, not beyond trying to win their votes. The Tories are also hitting the Liberals on provincially-run ferry services and on crime, although both parties are pledging major new hiring of provincial police officers and a lobbying of the federal government for more RCMP units in rural areas (in fact, the Liberals are promising more cops than the Conservatives are).
Politicians offer no meaningful change
The NDP is likely to improve on its one seat in the House of Assembly, held by leader Jim Dinn. But despite Newfoundland and Labrador’s 39.6 percent unionization rate — the highest in Canada — the provincial New Democrats have been eternally squeezed out by the Liberals, no thanks to the NDP’s longtime attempt to embrace well-off middle-class professionals instead of the urban and rural working class. The labour organization Trades N.L. said that 74 percent of its 14,000 members in skilled trades were unemployed in June 2024. A social democratic party of 50 years ago would have organized actively among these workers, whether in St. John’s or a small town, to win stable and safe work and better unemployment benefits. There is never a lack of unemployment in Newfoundland and Labrador: the province consistently ranks at or near the top of Canadian list in that statistic, with a rate of 9.9 percent in July (actually a drop from 10.5 percent in June), though there were net job losses for the 15-to-24-year-old group.
No meaningful change is on offer. No party is promising proper funding to the province’s sole university, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN). Indeed, the reigning Liberals ended a 22-year tuition freeze in 2021 and tuition costs have since exploded by 240 percent in a province that already struggled to provide appealing futures for its young people. MUN also cut its budget by over $20 million last June because of the stinginess of Hogan and his team, which will include 20 layoffs and the permanent elimination of all currently vacant teaching positions. Renewable energy, a vital industry in which Newfoundland and Labrador could be a pacesetter, particularly with wind, is barely on the parties’ radar. The Liberals have also blanched on healthcare, especially with the unpopular dependence on expensive “fly-in” nurses instead of training and hiring more nurses at reliable hours and rates of pay.
Many of the province’s municipal positions are uncontested, including in two city council wards in St. John’s and several mayorships of smaller towns. The St. John’s mayoral race is between two-term incumbent Danny Breen, who last ran unopposed in 2021, and small business owner Ivy Hanley, best known for fighting the city on occupancy permits for a Christmas shop. Neither has a solution for the housing crisis or the rising rate of homelessness in St. John’s, aside from tent sweeps as was done by Breen to clear homeless people from the grounds of the Colonial Building in May 2024. A report by End Homelessness St. John’s found that a minimum of 1,400 people had experienced homelessness in 2024 — at least one in 170 St. John’sers.
Working-class struggle needed
Organized struggles are absolutely possible today in Newfoundland and Labrador, despite — and partly thanks to — the lack of real options on October’s ballots. Dominion grocery workers struck in 2020 against low wages and though they were forced to sign a sub-par deal at the end, they won bigger improvements in their 2024 contract after grocery strikes elsewhere in the country. MUN students established a Palestine solidarity encampment in 2024, and anti-war activists targeted St. John’s-based Kraken Robotics in March 2025 to protest that company’s contract to supply the Israeli military with sensor equipment for drones and naval vessels. And of course, the postal and flight attendant strikes of the past two months have been fought here as well.
A working-class party, to organize and lead these and coming struggles, is as needed on the east coast as anywhere. The NDP, despite being the marginally best ballot option, is as far from this role as they are in the rest of the country, as they stick to efforts to incentivize companies to make private investments and perhaps tax them at a slightly higher rate later. The natural resources of the land and water, from the long-devastated cod stocks to oil to hydroelectricity, have been hoarded and squandered by the powerful with only limited benefit to the working population. The seizure and nationalization, without compensation, of big private firms like Irving and major private projects like mines would open major revenue sources that could fund healthcare and education without the capitalist class helping itself to big profits. It could also severely hamper these private interests’ political influence, so ably utilized through decades of Liberal and Conservative governments. These publicly-owned activities could be run by their workers in the context of a democratically agreed plan of province-wide production, which would address both the needs of city dwellers and Newfoundland and Labrador’s significant rural population. This new public control would extend to currently state-owned companies like NL Hydro as well, where workers currently get little if any more say than in private companies and where executives are nearly as well paid and unaccountable.
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