From Russell Wangersky comes a clean dissection of the provincial government's attack this past week on former premier Brian Peckford:
It was a knee-jerk communications strategy, and it was a bad one at that, if the idea was to try and counteract the statements.
It just turned on the bright lights and lit up the issue on the national stage.
There was no reason even to react, unless the message you’re actually trying to send is not that Peckford was out to lunch, but instead that, in the New Newfoundland and Labrador, no one should expect to be allowed to comment on the emperor’s new clothes.
Perhaps the message was supposed to be, “If you disagree, we don’t want your input. Keep your mouth shut, even if you’re members of our own party.”
And maybe reacting so harshly to Peckford’s comments was just the easiest way to pointedly deliver that message to all the rest of us.
-srbp-