News junkies in Newfoundland and Labrador have been treated these past couple of weeks to a truly odd series of exchanges between Premier Danny Williams and the federal regional minister, fish minister Loyola Hearn.
The two have traded barbs these past few years, despite the fact that in 1989 then-lawyer Danny Williams backed Loyola for the provincial Tory leadership. However this weeks exchange included references to some form of political espionage, at least according to some reports.
And that's only part of what makes the whole affair so strange.
In a year-end interview with CBC, Hearn said:
There are times I'm sure I know as much as what's going on in cabinet and caucus or on the eighth floor as the premier does.
The eighth floor, incidentally, is local political slang for the Premier's Office. It occupies the entire suite on the eighth floor of the Confederation Building's east block.
Note the words exactly. Hearn says that he knows - at times - as much about what is going on inside caucus or cabinet as Williams does. Not "more than"; not "less than": "as much as". This will become important later on.
More importantly, note the context in which the comments came. You'll find it in the ram audio file linked off the page quoted above at cbc.ca/nl. You see, context gives a clue to meaning. Get the context wrong and the meaning of the words can come out wrong.
Hearn is talking about - is obviously talking about - the federal Conservative prospects in the next election. Hearn says that he has personal friends within the provincial Tory caucus and that we shouldn't be surprised if some of them opt to run for the federal Conservatives. Then he tosses in the line about knowing as much as Danny about what goes on inside caucus and cabinet.
So there's the start of the whole controversy. For some reason, the CBC online story juxtaposes the context such that the "knows as much as line" comes before the bit about having candidates from friends in the local Tory caucus.
Take a look at the CBC television story and you get much the same idea as the radio story, though. Hearn is clearly talking about the overall relationship between the two parties. He couldn't be any more plain in stating that he has friends inside the local Tory caucus and while - at times - they've been forced to part company as a result of the Danny-Steve spat, overall Hearn has good and old political friends along the local Tories.
No where in any of this is there any hint that Hearn was talking about having spies inside Danny's den.
CBC didn't report it that way at all, and to be perfectly frank if there was the least bit of that kind of implication, CBC would be all over it. They'd poke at it, dig it and then tell the story they found.
But Hearn never hinted at spies and that isn't what CBC reported.
It is, however, what Danny Williams decided to take issue with almost a week later. You'll find Williams' comments from the CBC Morning Show on January 2. he claims to have received phone calls from people who feel that a "shadow" has been cast over the local Tories. Williams claims there has been some claim of infringement of cabinet and caucus confidentiality.
Williams goes so far as to say that "Mr. Hearn has made a pretty broad statement when he says he knows virtually everything that is going on inside caucus and cabinet and on the eighth floor." Now there's a huge difference between saying one knows as much as someone else from time to time. and saying that one knows "virtually everything", presumably all the time.
There's also no suggestion anywhere in Hearn's comments that any confidences have been breached. Hearn can know what is being discussed generally; plenty of people do. It wouldn't be strange at all for a federal cabinet minister to be aware of projects that are going to the provincial cabinet, especially where the project is a joint federal/provincial one. It also wouldn't be unusual for politicians to chat informally about issues confronting both administrations. All of that can take place - and does take place legitimately - without any suggestion that anyone is breaching confidences or is behaving improperly.
Now it should be fairly obvious at this point that this whole story took off when Danny Williams reacted with what are some of his vintage, hyperbolic misrepresentations. Does anyone remember, for example, the pre-election 2003 claim that someone was trying to hack the Tory computers when in fact it was merely a case of someone innocently sending an incorrect printer command? The police got called and found nothing at all.
The thing gets even sillier though.
Kevin O'Brien, recently demoted to be minister of licenses and permits, pulled an oram of absolutely historic proportions on Thursday in a call to one of the VOCM talk shows.
First, there is the blatant misrepresentation, dutifully following his boss' lead:
O'Brien: So, in other words, what he’s saying there is that, you know, at any given time, any given Cabinet, any given caucus in the federation of Canada,and including the federal side, can be broken.
...
He says, [presumably reading from a transcript] Loyola Hearn says he is always fully briefed on what is happening inside the Danny Williams government. "I always do. That’s why we can always be one step ahead of him, Hearn said in a year-end review with CBC News. I have friends throughout Cabinet and caucus."
Second comes the complete invention, the hysterical claim after some further misrepresentation:
But he is saying clearly here to me that he's going to try to prevent and try to undermine any type of, of a process that Newfoundland and Labrador may enter into to better ourselves and be, and take a rightful place in the federation of, of Canada.
Huh? Aside from questioning the transcript from which O'Brien was reading, one also has to wonder if the minister's ability to comprehend plain English has been removed.
But it gets worse as O'Brien becomes more fully engaged in his anti-Hearn diatribe. According to the former business minister, there are apparently few who can grasp what is going on in this province (and cabinet):
Well, I'm going to tell you something now. What's happening in Newfoundland and Labrador in regards to the energy plan and everything else that's been negotiated to the benefit of all the, the residents of the province, I don't think Hearn, and a good many of us, actually has the grey matter to understand it all.
Okay.
It's all good for a laugh, but hopefully, we've been able to demonstrate a couple of things.
First, Hearn didn't say what Williams accused him of saying. Hearn's actually stuck to his wording consistently, including in this Canadian Press story filed on Thursday.
Second, the media - at least CBC - got the story right the first time and continue to report Hearn accurately. The rest of the pack, CP and the Globe included, actually started riffing off Williams' misrepresentations. It's a nice job of spinning by the Premier, but frankly the reporters involved should be ashamed of themselves for such a a rudimentary failure of fact checking.
They fell for a stale ploy. After all, it's not the first time Williams has made a claim which is completely, totally, factually incorrect, is it?
Third, Hearn likely knew when he made the comments in the first place that the control-freakish guy on the Eighth would react badly to any suggestion that there might be some alternate source of power in the province than Himself. he said it, in part to provoke a reaction and in getting it demonstrated that he can actually stay one step ahead of the Premier.
Hearn could back off when Danny went ballistic without any real political loss. After all, what Hearn said was true. He has friends in Danny's caucus and, more importantly, every federal nickel spent in Newfoundland and Labrador flows across the regional minister's desk. That truth may cause the Premier to squeal, but it is still the truth even if Hearn appears to some to back off the remarks.
Fourth, as for O'Brien, well, we can conclude that he was just a casualty in the completely made-up story of spies in the Tory caucus. You see, there are a couple of spots in the O'Brien comments to VOCM where he notes that he used to be good friends with Loyola, that they come from the same part of the shore and so forth. Williams notes that Loyola used to have friends in caucus, obviously an oblique reference to Fabian Manning and Loyola Sullivan both of whom have the distinctive twang of the boys from the Southern Shore.
Aside from insulting and embarrassing himself simultaneously, the only thing poor Kevin gained was a perpetual could of suspicion. After all, a paranoid would ask, why would he have needed to profess his loyalty if there was no reason for him to feel guilty in the first place?
That leads us to the fifth point, namely that for all Williams' own paranoia and his apparently manic obsession with control, the nervous nellies who called him to assure The Boss of their loyalty actually are actually not Hearn's agents.
That is, if the agents ever existed in the first place, of course.
You see, the hallmark of a true double agent is that he or she appears more consistently and genuinely loyal to The Boss, all the while never drawing any attention to himself or herself.
They blend in.
And the Captain of the local ship of state will never suspect that there is a duplicate key to the wardroom so they can eat the strawberries, either.
-srbp-