Jerome! will announce he won’t be running for re-election.
Sometime before the end of January, he’ll make a statement.
Yes, yes, everyone knows that Jerome!’s already said publicly he’ll be running again but this rumour has survived that pretty clear statement. After all, Danny insisted he was running again but that turned out to be not quite what happened.
And it only took the Old Man a week or so to go from telling Debbie Cooper that he was constantly re-evaluating his future to flinging his gear into the truck and heading for the hills.
If Jerome doesn’t run again, he doesn’t qualify for a politician’s pension. That could be a powerful incentive to stay on for another term.
There’s pretty much no hope of a seat on a federally-appointed court. His buddies could appoint him to the Provincial Court but they’d have to give him a pretty senior and largely made-up appointment. No one expects that Jerome! is going to be sitting in Goose Bay or anything like that. That would also lead to lots of guffawing in the legal community as the guy who slagged political patronage appointments to the bench became one.
If Jerome doesn’t run again, then he’d have to go back to the old law practice or find some other business to pay the bills.
And then people could wonder who might run for the Conservatives in his place.
For now, though, it is still just a rumour.
- srbp -