Politics & Power Quote by Peter MacKay

The line is engineered to sound like personal grit while really being a pitch for partisan continuity. "Natural inclination" frames ambition as temperament, not calculation: MacKay isn’t chasing Ottawa, he’s simply following his wiring. That’s a classic political move, laundering strategy through character. "Finish what I started" borrows the moral language of responsibility and closure, implying an unfinished job and positioning any exit as quitting on the province.

Then he pivots from biography to branding. The repetition of "Conservative government" is deliberate: it treats governance as a jersey color, not a policy agenda. Nova Scotia becomes proof-of-concept, Ottawa the logical next market. The subtext is less "here’s what we’ll do" than "keep the team in power". It’s coalition-building talk, a reassurance to party activists and donors that provincial victory should be converted into national momentum.

Context matters: MacKay’s career has long been about stitching fragments of the Canadian right into something electable. Read that way, the sentence is a soft argument for consolidation: if Conservatives can govern at home, they deserve the keys to the country. There’s also an implicit contrast with Liberals as a default federal brand; he’s selling the idea that Conservatism can be normal, competent, durable.

What makes it work is its studied modesty. He says "I guess" and "what I want" to lower the temperature, but the destination is unmistakable: a narrative of inevitability, with Ottawa framed as the natural endpoint of a job already underway.