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Jonathan Dean – leader of the Atlantica Party, a former debating group that’s been gaining momentum and attention since its inception in Halifax in 2006 – unabashedly supports merging the four Atlantic provinces into a single political entity. The notion dovetails nicely with his low-cost, free-trade, small-government economic principles, about which he spoke recently with our contributing editor, Alec Bruce.
Atlantic Business Magazine: You and your party are on the record supporting Atlantic political union. This is a long-simmering debate…
Jonathan Dean: Naturally, it’ll be a nettlesome prospect trying to get it… ABM: Absolutely, but I’m interested in the genesis of your position.
JD: Well, I’ve always been politically interested. I got involved with a small group of people. We just started reading books, making comments, chatting about the news and so on. And then I said to them: Let’s start actually doing something. There were three routes we could have taken. One was to form an advocacy group. The second was to join a mainstream party. And the third was to start our own party. And we chose to do the latter. We realized that it’s not sufficient just to have greater freedom of information in our government. This is a worthy goal, and a good thing. But we need more and better ways to get new and fresh ideas into political discourse. That’s why we decided to launch. It was probably the more fun route to take, because we had nothing to lose. None of us clearly had any background in politics. And quite frankly, none of us is really interested in being a politician, but we are willing to take that on.
ABM: That’s certainly a novel approach: a political party whose members have absolutely no political ambitions! Or, at least, so you say.
JD: Well, the whole thrust of the Atlantica Party is not to become another mainstream party. We’re not going to follow the route of the NDP here in Nova Scotia, in which they’ve sort of arrived as a mainstream party…. I see the Atlantica Party as being a reforming party, and once it has achieved its aims, I’m not sure what the purpose of the party would be. We stand for putting up new ideas that you won’t get from the existing parties.
ABM: Other than Atlantic union – which is, frankly, a pretty old idea – what are the new ideas?
JD: These would encompass such things as electoral reform. Okay, let’s tackle that. I would be very happy if, at some point, we have a referendum on changing the electoral system in Nova Scotia, of which the Atlantica Party would be an advocate. We would actually be a clamouring advocate for electoral reform. I would be extremely happy if we could accomplish that. Whether or not the electors would go for that is entirely up to them.
ABM: Are you referring to some type of proportional representation?
JD: We like the single-transferrable-vote. We like it a lot. Although it’s also been put forward that we should approach this the way they did in British Columbia, where you have a citizens’ committee that gets together and comes up with something that’s not political. For me, of all the issues we have, that’s probably the easiest one. It’s easy to show that the system is broken and that it’s not working. Look, no system is perfect, but we can certainly improve on what we have. We think singletransferrable- vote, a form of proportional representation that has run-offs built into it, is the best. Related to this, we would like to see some political reform, as well. We’d like to see direct elections of the premier. We’d like to see a proper separation of powers. We don’t like the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. We like the idea of popular sovereignty. But, again, we’re most interested in getting the debate started. Ultimately, we want to put forward a proposal where the system can change itself.
ABM: Speaking of change, where does the party stand with respect to some of Atlantic Canada’s key economic issues?
JD: I guess you could call us noninterventionalists. We would like to see, for example, a different fiscal relationship with governments. Rather than accepting federal transfers through ACOA, and others, why don’t we do a deal where we get more tax royalties instead? Or we could apply that money to lowering taxes and costs across the board. We think that government is for creating infrastructure, making a place pleasant to live, helping people, educating people, and generally preparing the ground for industry and businesses to come in and create prosperity.
