Main party leaders agree on one thing. They are all happy with their campaigns
Election Day is Tuesday
Editor's Note: This article originally stated that three sources told CBC News that a member of the Liberal communications team was prompting Iain Rankin off-camera during a CTV debate. The Liberal party denies that. CTV's News Director, Dan Appleby, confirms to CBC News that there was no prompting. This article has been updated.
With just three days to go before election day, all three main party leaders are trying to visit as many ridings as possible before Tuesday's vote.
On Saturday, that meant a maximum of six ridings.
PC Leader Tim Houston's six-riding tour took him through the Annapolis Valley (Digby-Annapolis, Hants West, Kings West and South) and to two ridings in the Upper and Lower Sackville area (Sackville-Cobequid, Sackville-Uniacke).
The Sackville seats had PC representatives in the last House. The others were held by Liberals before dissolution.
Liberal Leader Iain Rankin paid a visit to three ridings along the South Shore (Chester-St Margaret's, Lunenburg and Lunenburg West) and two in Metro Halifax (Halifax Needham and Eastern Passage).
Two were Liberal-held ridings before dissolution and the other three were held by either an opposition politician or an Independent.
NDP Leader Gary Burrill was on a four-stop Cape Breton swing of the province. He visited Cape Breton Centre-Whitney Pier, Glace Bay-Dominion, Sydney-Membertou, and Richmond.
The Whitney Pier seat is the only one with an NDP incumbent. The other seats were held by PCs or Liberals.
Traditionally in the dying days of an election campaign, party leaders will visit ridings they believe their party might be able to snatch, or they pay visits to ridings they believe need a boost in order to hold a seat.
Almost over!
Although a 30-day campaign is the minimum any election can be in Nova Scotia, four weeks may seem like an eternity if a leader's tour has problems or simply cannot pick up steam.
Of the three main parties, the Liberals may be the happiest to see this campaign come to an end.
The party's campaign got off to a stumbling start with the unexpected departure of Robyn Ingraham, the Liberal candidate in Dartmouth South.
She claimed party officials instructed her to lie about why she dropped out. She said it was because boudoir photos on a pay-to-view website made party officials uncomfortable.
The issue dogged Rankin for a full week, in part because of the decision by those running the campaign to keep him in Cape Breton longer than planned in an effort to let the controversy blow over. It didn't.
There were meme-worthy moments for Rankin in a leaders' "debate." He appeared distracted during the exchange. Sources with knowledge of the setup say it was because a member of his communications team was in the room with him.
A spokesperson for the Liberal Party said Rankin was not communicating with his team member, but looking off-camera to see the other leaders on a monitor as they spoke.
Despite those moments, Rankin told reporters Saturday this was the campaign he intended to run.
"Absolutely," he said. "This is a positive campaign about the potential of this province.
"I've said at the start this is about recovery efforts. We have a plan that is not about endless political promises in the magnitude of billions of dollars. This is spending wisely and ensuring that we come out of this pandemic as strong as possible."
Burrill happy, too
Almost every day of the campaign, Burrill, a United Church minister, would sit at a picnic table, park bench or bleacher to chat with someone about a problem that was the issue-du-jour for the NDP.
Although staged, the format did allow the party to highlight key planks in its platform and their possible impact on an "ordinary" Nova Scotian.
Burrill seemed pleased with his party's campaign when asked for his assessment during his Cape Breton visit.
"We have seen over the four weeks now, of the campaign, a real growth in people's interest in what we've been talking about and real momentum around things that we're standing for," Burrill told reporters during a campaign event in Whitney Pier. "We're very encouraged at this point in the campaign."
Houston proud
Houston told reporters Saturday, during a stop at the Lower Sackville campaign office of candidate Steve Craig, that the prep work his party did in the months leading up to the election call served his party well.
He pointed to three party policy documents released during the past year — last summer's Dignity for Seniors, last fall's Universal Mental Health and last winter's Hope for Health as having laid the foundation for the PC campaign.
Houston said it was why his party chose to focus the past month almost exclusively on health care.
"I mean the stories in the past week about the ambulances and the situations, what our paramedics are being put through, it's just so obvious it is by far and away the biggest issue," he said. "I'm proud of the campaign we've run, for sure."
The focus made the central campaign message a constant. On Tuesday, Houston will find out if his party's single-issue gambit pays off.
Sunday
Houston plans to start the day in Antigonish, then head to Cape Breton to tour ridings there before coming back to Halifax tomorrow night.
Burrill plans to start his day with a policy announcement at the Alderney ferry terminal alongside Claudia Chender, his party's candidate in Dartmouth South. He is scheduled to campaign exclusively in metro Halifax after that.
Mary Chisholm, Iain Rankin's wife, will take centre stage today in Berwick where she will speak about the importance of "expanding midwifery services across the province" at a party campaign event. She is pregnant with the couple's first child.