CBC news reported last week that Scott Simms won;t be pursuing the provincial Liberal leadership.
That’s no surprise because the federal member of parliament was never really thinking about becoming a candidate.
If you look at the story in late January and now you cans ee something else.
Dean MacDonald, the undeclared leader of the provincial Liberal Party spoke to a crowd in Port de Grave district on Saturday night. There’s an account of his speech in the Telegram’s Monday edition.
Dean crapped on the provincial Conservatives for all sorts of things. Most of all, he seemed to think they lack what George Bush used to call the vision thing:
“I don’t think we have a vision, I don’t think we have a plan for the province. I don’t feel that we’re all on a team who all know where we’re headed,” MacDonald said. “The party that’s been in power too long believes their own bullshit, and the party that will sweep into power doesn’t, and that’s us.”
Contrary to what the Telegram reported, MacDonald didn’t seem to offer much of a vision himself during the speech. Well, certainly the Telly didn’t report any vision-like utterances and no one who attended the session seems to talk much about Dean’s vision. The Telly just included a few quotes confirming that the handful of people in the province who still support the Liberal Party see MacDonald as the Saviour.
This is not news.
Nor is it any sort of vision.
MacDonald reportedly spoke for 30 minutes. He shat on Kathy Dunderdale. He has done that before. And just as surely as he has criticised Dunderdale before, we should all remember that Kathy Dunderdale is doing nothing except continuing the plan of her predecessor, complete with his vision and using all the same people that her predecessor picked for their jobs. Kathy Dunderdale is following the agenda of Dannyism, right down to the hydro-electric project Danny Williams used as an excuse to retire.
In January 2008, Dean told the world - via The Independent - that what the province needed was 20 more years of Dannyism. There’s no sign Dean has changed his mind at all about that. In fact, after Dean criticised Dunderdale’s unsustainable spending in 2011, he quickly sucked it all back again.
Go back and take another look at Dean’s interview with David Cochrane last fall. You won’t be disappointed, which is more than you can say for some of the people who attended the fundraiser on Saturday night. Those would be the people who didn’t leap to their feet in applause at the end of Dean’s speech. That would even include the people who did stand and applaud but who did so slowly, after others had started. Rumours of wild enthusiasm were - like the depth of MacDonald’s insights – greatly exaggerated. You see lots of people – not just parties in power too long – believe their own bullshit.
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The federal Liberal convention this weekend shows just exactly how out to lunch the overwrought media commentary about the devastated Liberal party has been.
Around 3,000 delegates. Some said there were more than that; others said there were fewer.
Lots of interested and interesting discussion.
And a new president.
Keeping party membership is a good thing. One of the reasons political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador are in an abysmal state is the absence of a working membership system in any of them. Basically a party without membership becomes easy prey for the backroom types who thrive on secrecy. They can manipulate the whole thing, one way or another and they do.
Memberless parties also create a world in which voters have no particular attachment to the party and its principles. Again, the parties in Newfoundland and Labrador are classic examples of this sort of thing. Voters shift back and forth among the parties with ease largely because there is nothing to distinguish one from the other.
The elected types are no different. They all – basically – support exactly the same sorts of things. If it is popular, they will back it. That’s one of the big reasons why the NDP and Liberals have been basically just red and orange chapters of the Danny Fan Club since 2006 or so.
They haven’t opposed anything, except for show.
They still don’t.
So while the federal Liberals are already well on the way to change, the provincial Liberals are, well, not.
Talk of their demise is anything but exaggerated.
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Liberal leader Dwight Ball’s remarks on taking on the leadership:
The Liberal Party has a rich history in Newfoundland and Labrador and I’m proud to be a part of it.
That being said, we have much work ahead. I consider myself a team builder, and I believe teambuilding is what we need right now.
We need to reach out to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and listen to their hopes and dreams.
I plan on spending a lot of time on the road engaging with the grassroots of our party and encouraging new interest in what we have to offer.
Additionally, we need a debt reduction plan to help rebuild the party As a businessmen, I know the burden that debt can have on an organization and my first priority as Liberal leader will be to get our debt to a manageable level.
I like to call it the common sense approach – reach out, listen and manage debt.
These will be my priorities as I assume the Liberal leadership and help create a credible alternative to the current government.
There will be challenges ahead, no doubt. But it is through these challenges that we will realize a better, brighter future for the next generation of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians
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Guest post by Craig Westcott, from his editorial in this week’s Business Post.
If, as its president Judy Morrow has proposed, the Liberal Party puts off holding a leadership convention for two years, it will be making a serious, possibly ruinous mistake.
Like that one lonely turbot once described by then Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin as clinging to the Grand Banks by its fingernails, the Liberals are on the verge of extinction, despite its retention of Opposition status in the House of Assembly.
Tuesday’s CRA poll results confirm that.
For three consecutive quarters the NDP has marched upwards, standing solidly now in second place, its lack of Opposition status only temporary perhaps until the first by-election.
The bald truth is that nothing will get done to rebuild the Liberal Party without a real leader to push it. An interim leader won’t cut it, unless it’s someone of the ability of Bob Rae who is rebuilding the federal party while maintaining interim leader status. But Rae is an exception to the rule. There are no Bob Raes in the Liberal Party of Newfoundland, at least none that are obvious.
At the risk of telling tales out of school, I was shocked when I took the job as communications director for the Official Opposition last fall to learn there was no party apparatus backing the caucus. The fabled Big Red Machine no longer existed in this province. And even if it had existed, with a $700,000 to $800,000 deficit at the banks, there was no money to put gas in to run it.
There was no party membership list, there weren’t even district associations in most districts. Only for the work of long time MHA Roland Butler, who has perhaps the best organizational smarts in the party, there would have been no district associations in place to fight this past fall’s provincial election.
The sad truth was that little to no grassroots rebuilding had been done since the Liberals lost the disastrous campaign of 2007.
For most of the four years between elections, the leader retained interim status. For part of the time, until Morrow was elected party president, the executive headed by Danny Dumeresque was said by some in the party to be more determined to undermine interim leader Yvonne Jones than support her.
It was a mess. The view throughout the party was that as long as Danny Williams was leading the PCs, the Liberals didn’t have a chance of regaining government anyway, a mistaken view to those with knowledge of history. Joey eventually lost the confidence of the people and I believe Williams would have too, only much sooner than the 23 years it took Joey to crash. A more contemporary example, is Vladimir Putin, like Williams a wildly popular, dictatorial egomaniac while in office, who is now losing the confidence of the Russian people. Time brings down all dictators eventually, if death doesn’t get them first.
But I digress.
The problem with the Liberals is both a failure of leadership – on the party executive side as well as within the caucus - and also a matter of unfortunate circumstance.
During the year I spent with the Liberal caucus, it had only four members. The leader, Yvonne Jones, was off for much of that time, taking cancer treatment, though still involved with the running of the Opposition office. Another member, Butler, had his own health issue to face and was unable to participate in as much of the daily hurly burly as he wished. The other two members, Kelvin Parsons and Marshall Dean, had districts at the exact opposite ends of the island from St. John’s: One centred in Port aux Basques, 900 kilometres away, the other on the Great Northern Peninsula, situated even farther. When the House wasn’t sitting, which was often, they had to be in their districts tending to constituency matters. That meant they were unavailable to the television media in St. John’s (though full marks to Kelvin Parsons for beating it back and forth across the TransCanada every week to fill in for Jones and still take care of his constituents. If there was a prize for the hardest working man in politics last year, Parsons would have earned it).
Down the hall, the sole NDP member - the intelligent, earnest and hardworking Lorraine Michael - was in Confederation Building every day to take media calls. No sweat for her in that regard: Her seat was located in the city.
While a number of PC friends of mine have blamed the NDP surge in St. John’s on Danny Williams’ federal ABC campaign, which drove thousands of long time Tories into the Dippers’ camp, Michael deserves as much credit for also showing up for the media every day, especially when nobody from the Liberal office was available.
The situation for the current Liberal caucus is no better, despite the fact it has two more seats than last year. That’s because not one of the Liberal MHAs are from St. John’s or even the Avalon Peninsula. Two are from Labrador and the four others all have seats west of Deer Lake. The NDP, meanwhile, has five members, every one of them in St. John’s. Who do you think is going to win the war for media attention between now and the next general election in 2015?
And yet, the Liberal Party’s problems are not that hard to fix. It could probably write off all that debt by making a simple offer of 10 cents on the dollar to the banks. The debt is getting so old now it has probably been written off by the lenders on their own books already.
The party needs a full time organizer to rebuild and maintain the district associations, the basic battle units in any election.
It needs to take its head out of the water on the fishery and adopt a strategy that makes sense, resisting its outdated, overplayed, knee jerk habit of barking at the processors and shouting out support, but no real answers, for the plant workers and harvesters at all costs. Here’s a news flash gang: The fishery doesn’t decide elections anymore. There are so few people left working in the industry now, their votes can’t sway a campaign. And almost everyone in the industry is sick of being poor. They want change. Offer it to them. The PC government isn’t. That’s how you will win fishery votes.
And realize this: You can’t win the next election without winning St. John’s. So drop this rural/urban divide malarkey and devise some policies that will benefit the Avalon.
Finally, the Liberals have to regain some pride. The Grits have a good story to tell, if only they would tell it. Newfoundland’s current prosperity is due in large part to Liberal Premiers Clyde Wells and Roger Grimes, the guys who negotiated the three energy deals - as well as Voisey’s Bay – that are filling the government’s coffers. The crowd running the show now had nothing to do with any of it. And if Kathy Dunderdale implements this disastrous Muskrat Falls deal, the PC’s will destroy their chances of winning re-election next time around.
So there’s a lot to build for. But nothing will happen without a real leader to drive it. Waiting until 2013 will be too late. Find a leader now and have him or her ready to win a seat in the first by-election that comes up in 2012. Because if you lose that one to the NDP, the Liberal Party is finished.
If you stop writing yourselves off, maybe the rest of the province will too.
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Original idea comparing a Canadian political party to a hockey team, but Andrew Coyne’s metaphor for the problems confronting the federal Liberal Party works.
The Liberals think of themselves like a hockey team:
It has won several Stanley Cups in a row, but by the last of those cups, it was relying on a clutch of 43-year-old veterans. With their retirement, the team has no option but to spend a few seasons in the basement, rebuilding. If it learns patience, while the draft picks mature and the losses mount, the team may in time become a winner again. If it does not, it becomes the Leafs
The current state of the federal party mirrors that of the provincial one in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Not surprisingly on any level Coyne states more simply and eloquently what your humble e-scribbler observed about the provincial Liberal crowd back in October.
Your humble e-scribbler:
To get at the Liberal problem, you’ve got to get even more basic. When people say the Liberal Party doesn’t speak to people any more what that means is that the party no longer gives people a reason to support it.
If they want their party to survive in the future, Liberals have to figure out why anyone should care about the Liberal Party. It's a simple enough thing to state. The answer isn't implicit in it. And it goes to the heart of what any political party is about:
Why should anyone care?
Coyne:
If it is no longer the party of power, then it will have to spend some time redefining itself. In ideological terms, this means sharpening the definition. The vagueness that sufficed so long as power was in view will no longer. So the first question Liberals will have to ask is: why? Why be a Liberal, and not a member of some other party?
Coyne’s advice is that the federal Liberals should be “the party that tells it like it is”:
The Liberals, …, can instead be the bold party, the party that takes the principled stands that other parties won’t. On occasion this will take them to the left; on others, to the right.
Coyne offers sound advice. Having a political party that speaks plainly about any subject would be such a radical departure from the pre-packaged pablum of present day politics that the Liberals would instantly stand out.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the same thing could work. All three political parties say the same thing. Just take a look at the political panels on CBC’s On Point. Really listen to the comments. Get beyond the superficial jabs and pokes and you will be amazed at how often the New Democrats and Conservatives say the same thing or the Liberals agree with one or the other party or sometimes both.
Refreshing is not a word anyone would associate with any political party in Canada at the moment. Coyne is suggesting the federal Liberals give it a try.
The provincial Liberals could do that as well. But the situation here is far worse. The provincial Liberals not only do not seem to grasp the implications of their situation, they don’t even seem to realise they are in a situation at all.
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Free advice, they say, is worth exactly what you paid for it.
And when it comes to free advice on the provincial Liberal Party leadership, Dean MacDonald is more full of it than usual. CBC’s David Cochrane gave MacDonald free airtime this past weekend to share his insights into what the party needs to do.
Cochrane describes MacDonald as having “long Liberal ties” but that really isn’t an accurate description of MacDonald’s limited association with the Liberal Party. Sure the guy spent some time as Brian Tobin’s bagman for Tobin’s abortive federal leadership run. But other than that and raising some cash recently, MacDonald’s most significant act while associated with the Liberal Party was blading Roger Grimes as MacDonald’s old business buddy - Danny Williams – strode toward the Premier’s Office.
And that, dear reader, is the extent of MacDonald’s association with provincial Liberals. If that’s all that it takes to have not only ties, but long ones by some estimations, then perhaps that speaks more to the sorry state of the provincial Liberal Party at this point in history than anything else.
The guy, after all, hasn’t held any positions within the party, has an incredibly limited record of his own of making financial contributions to the provincial Liberals and, as far as it appears has absolutely no political experience whatsoever.
MacDonald acknowledges this point, by the way, when he talks about the need for establishing some street cred within the party.
And aside from suggesting he could “help out” by fundraising or doing some other odd jobs, MacDonald doesn’t offer much else.
What he does do is spout a phenomenal load of pure shit throughout the entire interview. One of the choice moments is when Cochrane asks MacDonald about Dean’s criticism about Kathy Dunderdale’s “unsustainable” spending. MacDonald quickly disavows any suggestion he was criticising the Conservatives.
When Cochrane notes – quite rightly - that Danny is the guy who started the unsustainable spending, MacDonald launches into an extensive Conservative apologia for Danny Williams’ unsustainable public spending. It’s vintage Williams bullshit from a charter member of the Fan Club.
Beyond that, Dean doesn’t have anything to offer on the Liberal Party beyond the need to “rebuild”, bring in "new people and fresh blood.
And that’s it.
To describe this as amateur and superficial would be generous. His own experience in fundraising is, by his own characterization, nothing beyond “arm-twisting” and organizing big dinners with high profile speakers.
On Muskrat Falls, MacDonald doesn’t do much better. he exaggerates his own involvement with the provincial government’s hydro corporation. His observations about the project and the issues involved are best described – again to be very generous – as superficial. MacDonald does not even have substantive talking points on the subject. The best he can do to try and counter David Vardy’s critique is suggest Vardy is recycled from the 1970s.
And that – you can see where this is going - is all there was.
If you want to talk about Liberal leadership politics, you’d be far better off looking at the federal party. There, at least, you can find people with ideas and energy. You can find people who have done a few things, taken a few for the team they were actually on, and who remain ready to do more.
The federal Liberals are talking about having a wide-open leadership race that lasts several months and involves a series of votes. Some are likening it to the American primaries. As the Toronto Star reported:
“This is not tinkering at the edges. This fundamentally changes how power in a political organization is exercised,” Liberal party president Alfred Apps told reporters on Thursday as the revival plan was released.
Some of the problems the federal Liberals have experienced are mirrored at the provincial Liberals:
For the provincial crowd, you can add a third one: a tendency to accept players from another team into their midst. Some of them even wind up being touted as potential leadership material spouting tons of free advice.
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Nova Scotia’s Liberals have long been dogged by their controversial trust fund.
But the Grits finally put the decades-old issue to bed at their annual general meeting in Halifax on Saturday.
Liberal Party president John Gillis said the party is divesting itself of $2.3 million in the fund to help establish a think-tank, the Allan J. MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Government.
Gillis told the meeting the new institute will honour a distinguished Nova Scotian who has dedicated his life to public service. A retired senator, MacEachen was a long-time federal Liberal cabinet minister and is an Order of Canada recipient.Just think about that.
So there you have it.
The Liberal caucus, less a vacationing Jim Bennett, met last week.
They decided Kevin can keep the job of Liberal Party leader and all the glory that involves these days.
He can keep it some time next year, as VOCM reported it.
Fact is, Aylward could be there longer.
What Aylward will do as party leader is unclear.
Why he was away from the caucus meeting that secured his future is equally unclear. The unspecified party business excuse is a bit like “to spend more time with my family”. It is a stock political excuse to be trotted out, when needed, even though everyone knows it is complete bullshit.
You can tell the caucus is enthusiastic about the future. You can see it in the looks on their faces in the scrum afterward when they told reporters about their momentous decision.
As for Yvonne Jones, the local media are reporting that she doesn’t want the leader’s job. What they all missed is that Jones has the de facto leader’s job she supposedly doesn’t want and the hefty extra salary to go with it. She has the plum spot in the opposition benches in the House of Assembly. She makes staffing decisions. Jones controls the budget. She gets to ask the first questions in the daily Question Period – when the House is sitting – and she’s the one the media will go to for comment.
Jones just announced to the world on behalf of the party leader what the party leader will do.
Yvonne Jones is the party leader for anyone who is paying attention.
From Yvonne’s standpoint, this is a best-case scenario.
So now what?
Well, that’s the political worst case scenario if you are one of the handful of people left in Newfoundland and Labrador still supporting the provincial Liberals. While there will be lots of talk about stuff that needs to happen on the glorious march back to power, recent history will tell you that none of it will happen.
The party simply doesn’t speak to anyone anymore and outside of the 10 or 11% of the electorate who voted for them, they don’t speak for much either.
With the leadership set up of Jones-Aylward, there’s obviously no cohesion or shared sense of direction. What the Liberals are left with is to keep going in circles for a while.
And that may be a long while, given that Saviour Messiah Dean the Magical Wonder Pony may not really want the job in the future just like he hasn’t really wanted it in the past.
In the meantime, you can count the number of minutes before the jokes start flowing from the Tories or Dippers about whether the Grit leadership creature is straight from Dr. Doolittle – with two heads – or the Pushmi - Pullyu’s other bits stuck together.
News of the Liberal leadership arrangement is met with both dancing for joy and chin-pulling scepticism, right, at a rally of all 11 Liberal Party supporters left in the province.
(Not exactly as illustrated.)
Indecision and inactivity over the course of four years are what led to the recent fiasco capped off by one of the most spectacularly inept and incompetent campaigns in recent political history.
More indecision and inactivity - guaranteed under the current leadership arrangement - won’t make anything better. Well, not if the goal was to challenge the Tories for the government in 2015, it isn’t. At this rate the Liberals will be fighting for the life and struggling to hold onto the opposition in 2015 as the Tories and Dippers duke it out for power.
As it stands today, the Liberal Party faced a near death experience a couple of weeks ago, a real “holy f***, that was close” moment.
Now that the danger has passed, they want to get right back to the old ways of doing business that put the party in his current sorry state.
The party needs to change.
A credible political party cannot afford to have a repeat of recent history including the way Jones left the job a few weeks ago and the board picked her replacement.
Change means things have to be different. More of the same is not an option. Change also means that so many people within the party will have to give up the traditional Liberal Party delusion that some saviour, some messiah will appear and make all the problems go away.
The party also can’t afford to try and recycle someone – whether Aylward, Efford or Jones – even on a temporary basis. Temporary has a tendency to become permanent, especially when the shock of a near death experience wears off.
That was the SRBP call on October 13, in what turned out to be a truly Kreskin-like moment. And then the caucus decided to follow right on with an ad for a new Messiah.
No matter what the Liberals do next, they’ve pretty much sealed their political fate.
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Kevin Aylward did a yeoman service to his party by stepping in and leading it through a tough time.
He didn’t add anything to the seat tally.
Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shite. Those seats came from the hard work of the individuals running in each of them plus, in one case, the marvels of the internal combustion engine.
Now Aylward finds himself a leader without a seat in the legislature.
The political gods have a fine sense of humour.
Not to worry.
There’s not much point in Kevin hanging about. Even if your humble e-scribbler had not already suggested that convention dictates he go, Kevin is facing the advice of one of his old caucus mates.
Chris Decker told listeners to a CBC radio call-in show that Kevin needs to go:
For one thing, Decker said, the Liberals would lose Opposition status, as they would then be tied with the NDP at five seats each.
As well, Decker said, Tuesday's election showed that the Liberals cannot count on voters in any particular district.
Former cabinet minister John Efford chimed in and suggested the party should hold a leadership convention so that Kevin or John himself or anyone else who wanted it can have a go at the job.
Tuesday night proved to be a “holy f***, that was close” moment for the people running the Liberal Party and for people, like John Efford, who want to run the party.
Now that the danger has passed they want to get right back to the old ways of doing business that put the party in his current sorry state.
The party needs to change.
A credible political party cannot afford to have a repeat of recent history including the way Jones left the job a few weeks ago and the board picked her replacement.
Change means things have to be different. More of the same is not an option. Change also means that so many people within the party will have to give up the traditional Liberal Party delusion that some saviour, some messiah will appear and make all the problems go away.
The party also can’t afford to try and recycle someone – whether Aylward, Efford or Jones – even on a temporary basis. temporary has a tendency to become permanent, especially when the shock of a near death experience wears off.
That would be the way not to change.
And if people want the Liberal Party to survive, change is the only choice left.
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