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“Paul Davis is certainly no Stephen Harper,” said Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Paul Davis in a somewhat awkward third-person reference earlier this month.

Of course, it’s debatable whether Davis’ government is really all that conservative to start with. The party’s now-retired scion, Danny Williams, famously urged voters to support “Anything But Conservative” in the last three federal elections.

In this latest campaign, Davis has been warning that a vote for the Liberals would shrink the size of government. “They laid off thousands of public servants,” he said of the last time the Liberals last governed Newfoundland and Labrador, in the pre-oil boom 1990s.

And, in a particularly rare election move for a Tory government, Davis has been cosying up to unions to warn that Liberals are “sharpening the axe” for a whirlwind of spending cuts.

“I will reward you fairly and quickly when we regain fiscal capacity,” he said in an October speech to the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public Employees, the province’s largest union.

The Liberals, meanwhile, are promising tax cuts. Specifically, a repeal of hikes to the HST.

Liberal leader Dwight Ball is even using one of Stephen Harper’s favourite campaign phrases. As he said in early November, his tax cut will “put money back in the pockets” of Newfoundland and Labradorians.

It’s been a slow slide for the province’s Progressive Conservatives. In 2013, an Angus Reid poll was showing that Newfoundland and Labrador premier Kathy Dunderdale was the most unpopular in Canada.