Otherwise you wind up with a credibility gap. It’s bad enough for ordinary people, but when you are – for example – the Premier of a province, having people doubt that what you say is true, you are pretty much headed for disaster.
Now Kathy Dunderdale has had a problem with getting things straight before, so, for many readers of these e-scribbles, this latest episode will come as no shock. They can just look at this as more evidence of the problem the Premier has with figuring out a whole bunch of things lately.
On Tuesday, Liberal leader Dwight Ball asked the Premier for details on her meeting with the Prime Minister. As it turns out, she hadn’t asked for one at that point, but that’s another issue. Ball prefaced his question by saying the Liberals had been telling the Premier to cut out the letter exchange and meet face to face.
So the Kathy Dunderdale said:
The rewriting of history goes on, Mr. Speaker. Never in the last few months has the Leader of the Opposition or any of his colleagues asked me to organize face-to-face meetings with the Prime Minister. I have done so on my own initiative and recently made the request for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker.Ummm.
Well…
no.
March 26. Yvonne Jones:
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, but the letter-writing campaign is just not enough. We were told by the Minister of Municipal Affairs weeks ago that there were letters sent to Ottawa, which we have not seen any response to yet on this. His response is like the response that I got from Stephen Harper's office; there is not much odds about it, Mr. Speaker.
I ask you today, Premier: Are you prepared to go to Ottawa - because we are prepared to go with you, stand with you shoulder to shoulder - and fight the federal government? If you are not prepared to do it, Mr. Speaker, we are prepared to go and rally on Parliament Hill without you. Which way would you like to have it?Now that’s one incident. It’s not like Dunderdale forgot. After all, she continuously needles the Liberals about the meeting they did arrange after that exchange.
But here’s the thing: the Liberals did push the idea of meeting while Dunderdale insisted – until now – that she had everything under control and that her letter-writing campaign was fine. She has said her relationship with the Prime Minister is fine, even though the Premier and her staff had some difficulty arranging a simple telephone call in which Dunderdale was on one end of the line and PMSH was on the other.
She got nothing out of the call, incidentally, except a pain in her neck.
If the Premier and her crew don’t fall into a bottomless credibility gap first, they will leave everyone confused by their shifting positions, explanations and excuses. She doesn’t have to look very hard to see one possible explanation for her political problems.
And, of course, once she recognises there is a problem, she can correct it.
She just has to recognise there is a problem first.
You’ve got to understand:
- that you are in a hole,
- that being in the hole is a bad thing,
- that getting out of the hole is a good idea, and,
- that the best way to get out of the hole is to stop digging.
-srbp-