A Hugh Shea for our time

In the most recent twist of an already bizarre tale, Brad Cabana has managed to turn what had been a fiasco inside a tragedy into a farce.

There is no other word for it, but farce:  a member of the federal Conservative party and wannabe leadership candidate for the provincial Conservatives expresses his fervent desire to perpetuate Dannyism in the province…and having been rejected by his own party now proposes to take that bag of ideological and other wares to the Liberal party.

Not to be left out of the play, some local Tory supporters – the most ardent of Danny-ite diehards among them - are claiming that this is proof that Cabana was just the tool of some dark Liberal or Harperite conspiracy in the first place.  The smallest problem with that thought is that they are deadly serious about the idea.

Some might put this down to being nothing more than another symptom of a political system still working through a great shock. Danny Williams’ hasty departure would certainly count as that shock.  And perhaps Cabana is nothing more than the usual local political gadfly or eccentric character with a rare opportunity to get more attention than he might otherwise.

There might be something to that.

Then again, if that is the case, we may well have yet more proof that the province’s political culture is in a precarious state.

Forty years ago, as Joe Smallwood’s political empire crumbled around him, even the most ossified corner boy could rhyme off four or five potential premiers from the Liberal or Progressive Conservatives.  Most of the prospects had served in Smallwood’s cabinet at one time or another.  And there were the colourful characters thrust into the limelight at different times over the course of 1971 and 1972 as they changed parties and plotted and planned. 

These days, the most addled patient in a methadone program couldn’t name a single politician, most likely, let alone a brace.

And as for the others, let’s just say that as the province seems to be missing the broad range of political talent it once produced, so too is it short the rest of the spectrum.

Brad Cabana is no Hugh Shea.

Not by a long shot.

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How to be a Tory

The bunker team that ruled on Brad Cabana’s appeal of his rejected leadership bid made a fascinating – and most likely inadvertent – description of what standards they used to determine who might be considered a member of the provincial Conservative Party.

You can hear this in a debrief CBC Provincial Affairs reporter David Cochrane did with the St. John’s Morning Show’s Jeff Gilhooley on Friday morning.

Cochrane reported that the Conservative appeals team found that only three of the names on Cabana’s nomination forms were considered to be party members.  They came to the conclusion after scouring membership lists from district associations, youth groups and other affiliated organizations as described in the party constitution.

Sounds good and official so far, right?

And then Cochrane started listing the three.

The first one he described was a person who may have – note the conditional language – put up a few signs during an election campaign.

Hold the phone.

That’s it?

May possibly have been vaguely recalled to have helped out on a sign crew. 

Okay.

So how many signs do you theoretically have to stick in the ground? 

Is it one? 

A dozen?

Do the signs have to be in the ground or could you have been seen holding one lovingly at some point?

Do you actually have to have done it or is it a function of someone else’s efforts?  After all, maybe this was back in the 1990s when every Tory householder included a sign.  Junior sticks it in the window to piss Dad the Dipper off and presto the whole family is down in some registry of known Tories kept in someone’s basement?

Maybe the whole membership process isn’t even that specific.

Maybe you only have to look like someone who might have erected a sign: Yes, by. That fellow looks like a guy who helped me out years ago.  He’s a member then.

After all, as Cochrane related the tale, the Tories weren’t even sure this guy or gal actually wielded the hammer or got the splinters from holding the two by two. They thought he may have.

And while they weren’t even 100% certain of that they were prepared to say that the person was a member in order to meet the clear and stringent requirements set down in the Tory party constitution.

We know this is such a document since coronation chairman Shawn Skinner – with no real or perceived conflict of interest whatsoever, surely – duly blessed the outcome.

Now that sign guy doesn’t sound like someone whose name wound up on an actual membership list. After all, the party  doesn’t really have membership lists as such since the party doesn’t have members, as such. There are no cards or dues or any formal way of identifying as a member of the party.

In fact, the party considers every person in the district over the age of 18 years to be a member for the purposes of voting in nomination contests.  And under the party constitution only members can vote.

So basically before Cochrane even got that far in this tale, the story totally demolished the bit before it. If the Tories had actual membership lists to scour, they wouldn’t have had to be beggar someone’s failing memory of a sign crew that could have gone off with a van and the dozen bear and a few dozen signs at any time back to 1972, at least.

And if they really had some sort of membership lists with rules that are clear, widely known and fairly applied, they wouldn’t be crediting Cabana with finding a possible Tory sign jockey.

In case you'd forgotten, the same people who are living this tale of membership stupidity are the same people who control about seven billion a year in public money.

it would all be hysterically funny if that were not true.

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Connie Leadership 2011: a simple but apparently overlooked point

So now the Conservatives’ appeal team have tossed a decision out of the bunker that says Brad Cabana had only three names they recognised as members of the party.

Appeal denied!

Never saw that coming.

Liberace was gay and now this.

Anyway, while this Cabana-gate fiasco has been dragging on and on, the Conservatives held a nomination to select a by-election candidate.

The requirement to vote in the nomination – as widely reported – was that the person had to be over the age of 18 years and resident in the district.  Bring along a couple of pieces of identification and they let you vote.

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that such an approach means the party actually recognises any person resident in the district and over the age of 18 years to be, by default, a member of the Conservative party.  If they required someone to sign a statement that they supported the aims of the party, then that’s only a minor additional wrinkle.

And what does the party constitution say about voting in a district nomination fight?  That’s really important because the Conservatives down the bunker are using the party constitution to claim Brad’s list of names doesn’t qualify.

Article 12, Section 6 of the Progressive Conservative Party constitution reads:

Eligible voters entitled to vote for a person to be elected as the Party Candidate are those persons who are members of the District Association, ordinarily resident in the Electoral District at the date of the Nominating Meeting and who are not less than eighteen (18) years of age either at the date of the nominating meeting or at the date of the election, if the date of the election has been set…

read that first bit again.

“Eligible voters”, that is, those people “entitled to vote for a person to be elected as the Party Candidate” in a by-election or general election are… “persons who are members of the District Association”.

Sounds simple.

The people who can vote are members of the District Association.

Okay.

So how can you tell who are member of the association?

Well, look at the official party announcement.

It merely refers to “voters”, as in:

“Voting will be held on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in two locations; they are:

• Corner Brook - Elks Club
• Gallants - Town Hall

Voters are reminded to have two pieces of I.D., one of which must include a street address and picture.”

And in that case as in every nomination since 2003, the Conservatives have allowed anyone with an address in the district and matching identification to vote.

Only members of the district association can vote and members means anyone living in the district over the age of 18 and possessing some valid identification.

So how exactly can a party that – by repeated practice – accepts anyone living in a district over the age of 18 years claim that a list of 73 people over 18 years of age and living in the province actually contains 70 names that are not members of the Conservative party?

Sounds like the party has the same legal geniuses on this cases as the ones employed in the AbitibiBowater expropriation, the 1969 contract litigation and the Ruelokke thing.

A clause that says the tribunal decision is binding on both parties actually says a judge can’t rule on the decision.

That one got laughed out of the courthouse and all the way down Duckworth Street.

Uh huh.

Next think the Legal Genius(es) will try and insist that a judge has no jurisdiction over a corporation registered in the province and operating under the Companies Act.

There are judges on Duckworth Street already drawing lots to see which of their numbers get to sort out that little legal turd and the turd-wrangler who gets to lay in in front of his or her bench.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Tweet of the Week

…how is it not democratic. [?] A political party is not a democratic institution. Decisions are made by members.

Seen in the twitter-verse from an ardent Conservative supporter in Newfoundland and Labrador in a discussion on the never-ending saga of the Conservative efforts to keep Brad Cabana from upsetting their carefully laid back-room plans.

 

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Coo-coo for Connie Puffs

yes, those busy little political beavers in the Confederation Building are still obsessing over certain questions on VOCM’s question of the day.

They learned their Danny-lessons well.

The latest question to get goosifed was one about the Conservative leadership race and the back-room deal Brad Cabana is fighting to bust wide open.

10,616 clicks, 80% of which went in the “no” column for a question asking if Brad should be allowed to run for the Tory leadership.

Now in all likelihood the past practice holds, which means that tax dollars in some government office got spent paying some staffer or bunch of staffers to bust up a computer mouse casting these “votes”.

But aside from displaying a pretty shagged set of priorities, this little display does illustrate the lengths to which the back-room boys over at Connie headquarters are prepared to fight off any attempts at bringing modern democratic ideas inside the Bunker that Danny Built. Hisself’s legacy is apparently too precious to throw away on such frivolities at fair voting, open membership and debate free from intimidation and afternoon visits from executive  assistants.

It’s a pretty sad commentary on how far the once mighty and respected party has fallen lately. The only thing sadder would be the plants clogging up comments sections defending the party’s anti-democratic bent.

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Same and different: Alberta and NL Conservatives’ leadership issues

Alberta premier Ed Stelmach is leaving politics in the face of a revolt within his caucus, according to the Globe and Mail.

Kyle Fawcett, a first-term MLA from Calgary and one of the more fiscally conservative in his party, acknowledged there were cracks in Mr. Stelmach’s cabinet.

“I do think that there was a bit of an issue in caucus,” he said. “There were some challenges around, obviously, this upcoming budget, and some promises that had been made. And I think the Premier saw that as an obstacle that maybe he didn’t want to tackle at this point in his life of public service.”

The unexpected news on Tuesday makes for some interesting comparisons with events in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past couple of months.

Danny Williams left politics unexpectedly in early December.  

Unlike Stelmach, Williams wasn’t facing any obvious internal political problems although he did drop hints of difficulties within his caucus.

Like Williams, Stelmach left politics with the accusation that the opposition parties would employ American-style political attacks in the upcoming provincial general election. Unlike Williams, Stelmach wasn’t a hypocrite in making such a comment.  Williams used Republican-style politics for his entire political career.

While the Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador cooked up a backroom deal to avoid a leadership contest, their Alberta brothers and sisters can look to a quick contest among several cabinet ministers that could be over by the end of March.

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A country apart? More like a world apart

In British Columbia, two of the province’s major political parties are holding leadership contests.  There’ll be lots of debate and discussion.

Meanwhile on the other coast, one of the province’s political parties is desperately trying to make sure its secret backroom deal holds together so they can avoid any debate at all.

And the guy the back room boys are trying to keep out of their private clubhouse is vowing to fight what he calls the “feudal“ politics of the province’s ruling Conservatives.

The drama is national news.

Embarrassing national news.

Danny Williams’ successor is busily making sure Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t seen as the youngest, coolest province.

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Rick Hillier? Tim Powers? No thanks, say NL Tories

Whatever is going on in Newfoundland and Labrador these days certainly is politics but it most certainly is not democracy.

What is dizzying, to borrow Tim Powers’ word, is the pace at which the province’s Conservatives are trying to keep a back-room political plot hatched over Christmas from exploding into a catastrophe as large as Danny Williams’ polling numbers.

“Everyone should have a right to put their name on a ballot assuming they adhere to the rules,” write Tim Powers in the Globe and Mail last week.  That is certainly true but it assumes that the rules are clearly known or, to be more accurate faithfully applied by the “officials” who, after exampling Brad Cabana’s nomination documents, “decided they didn't fit the criteria set out by the party.”

Perhaps the most useful way to look at this political farce is to use not Brad Cabana as our test subject but no less a person than Tim Powers. 

You see, when Danny Williams took to his heels and fed the Confederation Building, Tim’s was one of the first names some people offered up as a potential replacement.

Some other contenders, like finance minister Tom Marshall and then-education minister Darin King said they would take the time over Christmas to talk with friends and family.  They’d come back after Christmas end let the world know what they’d decided.

By Friday, December 24, though, that had changed.  Marshall, King and presumed heir-apparent Jerome Kennedy held news conferences to say that they’d be backing Kathy Dunderdale instead. Dunderdale, you may recall, was supposed to be the interim leader and had indicated she had no interest in the job. 

Off went everyone to Christmas holidays.

Another minister dropped out and by December 30, Dunderdale wanted the job. Virtually the entire caucus, she said, backed her.

Curiously that was the same day the party announced it would accept nominations for leader until January 10. 

Now if either Tim or Rick Hiller – living in Ottawa, were still pondering their future, they certainly wouldn’t have had much time to get their papers in order.  By the time the party announced that it would accept nominations, the race was effectively over. That’s exactly the point that cabinet minister Ross Wiseman and his executive assistant made to Cabana on January 5.  Since the entire caucus and their district associations backed Dunderdale, the odds of winning were very slim.

Besides, wrote Chick Cholock, Wiseman’s executive assistant, a contested leadership would put at risk Danny Williams’ legacy. “We do not want a Party [sic] divided now that Danny has moved on,” wrote Cholock in an e-mail.”

None of the arguments Wiseman and other Conservatives have offered about Brad Cabana had anything to do with following rules or his quality has a candidate. 

They had everything to do with an apparent desire within the caucus to avoid a contested leadership fight of any kind.  In other words had Tim or Rick decided to go all-in  now that the caucus made a decision, they would almost surely have been met with exactly the same arguments that faced Cabana:

1. They wouldn’t stand a chance since all the people now determined to be party members had already decided, and
2. a leadership contest in itself created the risk of fracturing the party beyond repair.

The Conservatives could lose the October election, as Cholock suggested in an e-mail he sent Cabana before nominations closed on January 10.

Wiseman and others did slide in another interesting qualification that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Conservative Party constitution.  Cabana hadn’t lived in the province very long, Wiseman noted in a scrum he gave after Cabana revealed Cholock had visited him on January 5 to try and discourage him from running. Nor had Cabana been very active in party functions, apparently.  There are two other grounds by which both Tim Powers and Rick Hillier would be disqualified.

If you are tired of the tedium that is federal politics, there is a drama unfolding in Newfoundland and Labrador.  But  the party that Danny Williams built is hell bent on showing that what they are up to is about as far from democracy as Parliament Hill is from excitement.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Party delays appeal hearing

According to the Telegram, the provincial Conservative Party is postponing the appeal into it’s decision on Brad Cabana’s leadership bid.

The party is postponing the hearing date from January 21 to January 24 to accommodate one member of the hearing panel who has a scheduling conflict.

The party rejected Cabana’s leadership nomination claiming that he did not have enough signatures of people the party recognises as members.  Cabana and the party both contend that the party has an open membership process.  The party contends that open membership doesn’t mean it is actually open.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Spooky stuff

In the middle of the 1990s, some guy  - a “prominent young St. John’s lawyer” apparently thought the Tories should have a leadership contest because the caucus was behind Len Simms:

His reasoning: Simms will win anyway so endorsing a competitive political race would be a waste of PC party funds. It came down to money for him.

Now there’s an unfailing testimony to the sterile decline in respect for the value of democracy in the PC party of Newfoundland.

That prominent St. John’s lawyer? You guessed it — Danny Williams [via The Telegram letters page last week]

As Premier, Danny Williams gave Len Simms a plum patronage job heading the province’s housing corporation.

Hmmm.

Makes you wonder now about all the Danny sightings in and around the Confed Building the past couple of weeks and the rumours that he helped broker the back-room deal to keep Kathy Dunderdale in place.

Whatever is going on in those Conservative back-rooms and the front seat of an Escalade, it sure as heck ain’t about democracy.

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Empty gestures and tells

The fact that Kathy Dunderdale volunteered a certain comment in a scrum on Thursday tells you it was a prepared line, likely to try and counteract the fairly plain idea that her leadership is a done-der-deal cooked up in a back-room somewhere before Christmas.

Dunderdale volunteered that she “would have” welcomed a contested leadership for the Conservative Party.  She changed the verb tense because the one that first spilled from her lips actually confirmed the “done deal” impression everyone has but the damage was done.

It’s a bit like the Conservative Party website. Before Christmas it proudly displayed a heavily photoshopped shot of the new Premier, identified as the party’s “interim” leader.

Now the whole thing is gone.  It looks like the Conservatives don’t have a leader at all.

You can tell the Conservatives have a mess.

The tell you they have a mess by all their gestures to deny there is a mess.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Logically challenged Conservatives

So if the whole thing was a slam dunk  because all the Tories – by their own definition – were backing Kathy Dunderdale and Brad was wasting his time, why have so many Tories been so agitated for the past week or more about the prospect he might file nomination papers?

I mean if he had no chance then an experienced political operator like Chick shouldn’t have been so agitated that he took it upon himself – according to Ross Wiseman -  to head out and have a chat with Brad to explain to him why he didn’t stand a chance.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Dunderball Run!

How many surprising things could we find out on Wednesday in the ongoing  soap opera that is the back-room deal to a leadership contest of any kind within the province’s Conservative Party?

Well, certainly no one would have expected that the Conservatives would send out business minister Ross Wiseman to confirm that the whole thing was, in fact, a lash up.

He didn’t mean to do that, supposedly, but he did.

Wiseman spoke to reporters after wannabe Conservative candidate Brad Cabana accused Wiseman’s executive assistant of threatening him and otherwise trying to persuade Cabana to stay out of the race.

We’ll get to that scrum in a minute.

Let us first of all consider the contents of an e-mail that the executive assistant – Chick Cholock – sent to Cabana, apparently some time in December.  You have to say apparently because in the version posted by CBC the thing is devoid of any identifying marks of any kind. The e-mail could have been typed up on Wednesday or heavily edited to remove any incriminating or dubious statements.

For the sake of keeping this moving, let’s just imagine for a moment that the parties to this farce are not complete imbeciles incapable of organizing even a garden variety Christmas pantomime.  And let’s note that Cholock is either not very well informed, incidentally, or is pulling his nose in the opening sentence, but that is another story.

Let’s just look at this bit, first:

In an ideal world there would be no leadership challenge.  They always end badly.  This paragraph displays Cholock’s ignorance of political history in the province.  It also shows a fundamental anti-democratic strain that is, sad to say, not very surprising.

On the other hand, it confirms, as regular readers know, that there are indeed cleavages inside the Conservative Party that are so deep that the back-room types are petrified at the prospect.

Let us now turn to Wiseman’s scrum.  There’s a version on the CBC website and another on the Telegram’s website.

In his first long answer to the first question, Ross states that “it was well known and well understood” that the entire caucus backed Dunderdale at that point as were most of the district associations. Wiseman says that given that it was highly unlikely any challenger could succeed.

That hardly sounds like an open process.

When asked about an open process, Wiseman tries to insist that the process is open but then quickly returns to the point that everyone – caucus and district executives – were all backing Dunderdale and therefore Cabana had a tough row to hoe if he ran.  That was the “backdrop”, according to Wiseman, for Cholock’s comments.

Wiseman insists that Cholock was acting as a private individual when he visited Cabana’s house in the middle of the work week to discuss Cabana’s candidacy.  Wiseman does rattle off Cholock’s extensive experience in the party and his history of party involvement but then claims that any conversation was done on Cholock’s own time and was unofficial. Wiseman did not explain why he was speaking for his executive assistant on a personal matter, as opposed to having Cholock do the talking for himself.

Wiseman also acknowledges that Cabana contacted the Tory caucus seeking support before he submitted his nomination papers.

But here’s the thing:  Wiseman essentially confirms that Cholock went to cabana’s house to explain that Cabana was wasting his time, given that everyone had already declared for Dunderdale.  David Cochrane from CBC asks the question using those words – “wasting his time” – and Wiseman concurs.

But the fix was not in.

Sure.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Is anyone surprised?

Brad Cabana’s candidacy is ruled invalid.

The Telly reported based on Cabana’s Twitter feed. CBC reported based on comments by convention co-chair Shawn Skinner and Cabana.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Acorns and trees

nottawa succinctly describes the way that Danny Williams’ supporters are applying the lessons he taught them to defeat a challenger to their back room plans and yet who claims he wants to carry on with the Williams legacy and style:

Brad Cabana, in a mere few hours, has somehow managed to present the regime with a bit of a conundrum. He's all three enemies rolled into one.

If he wants to be one of them, and if he wants to lead them, then what kind of a traitor/enemy/non-person is he? And what is the appropriate response?

The party brass are meeting to discuss.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Brad and circuses

Conservative Party insiders are so desperate to block any leadership contest that they are willing to creatively reinterpret the party constitution so that only people they chose get to be members for the purposes of deciding who gets to lead the party.

CBC’s David Cochrane reported on Monday that the Conservatives evaluating Cabana’s nomination forms have decided that “members” are only the members of district associations and other similar people described in one subsection of Article 5 of the party constitution:

ARTICLE 5 MEMBERSHIP

1. All persons who are residents or domiciled in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador and who support the principles and aims of the Party are eligible to become members of the Party.

2. Subjects to Article 5-1 all individual members of affiliated associations and groups who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party.

3. Notwithstanding Article 5-1 and Article 5-2, all members of the Provincial Executive Council as defined in Article 7-1 who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party. Any member of the Provincial Executive Council who ceases to support the principles and aims of the Party will automatically cease to be a member of the Provincial Executive Council and forfeit all rights and privileges associated therewith.

Now that’s not really ambiguous except to anyone lacking basic English language skills.  The sub-section da byes are relying on is the third one but that only makes sure that the district and provincial executive people get counted as members and that resigning from such a position has a price.

The main bits of the section define membership pretty broadly.

But if the back-room boys succeed in disqualifying Brad Cabana because he doesn’t have any Sub-section 3 “members” on his nomination form, that might not be the only problem they cause.  Cabana is reportedly planning a legal challenge to this bit of  legal tomfoolery, and that would normally be enough of a problem.

The Conservative insiders who are trying to dictate who gets to be Premier may also cause themselves some other embarrassment if not real legal difficulties.

You see, membership also affects who can be candidates in elections.  Plus, under Article 12 of the Conservative party constitution the definition of membership also determines who may vote in a candidate selection process:

Eligible voters entitled to vote for a person to be elected as the Party Candidate are those persons who are members of the District Association, ordinarily resident in the Electoral District at the date of the Nominating Meeting and who are not less than eighteen (18) years of age either at the date of the nominating meeting or at the date of the election, if the date of the election has been set.

So it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that if “members” are only people currently serving on a district executive, then the party will pretty quickly cease to exist.  The only people they can nominate as a candidate to replace Danny for example are one of the people currently sitting on the Humber west executive.

Underneath it all, though, what people across Canada  are really seeing here is the attitude some people have to political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador.  The attitude is consistent with the sort of patronage-riddled, paternalism that has defined the past decade or so of provincial politics.

Under that model, the party is merely the handful of back-room brokers who rule over everyone and everything else. They are accountable to no one except themselves.

Listen to how many people who have said already that if the caucus is decided then Cabana doesn’t stand a chance. That reflects the old-fashioned view of a party and ignores the fact that even under the Conservative constitution, a significant chunk of the delegates to a leadership convention are supposed to be elected in each of the districts.

You can also see the old-fashioned notions contained in this if you look at the complete lunacy of the Conservative position.  Danny Williams argued that Roger Grimes, elected by a convention of elected delegates couldn’t stay on as premier.  To make sure that couldn’t happen again – supposedly – Williams and his colleagues set new rules with changes to the province’s Elections Act that would require a general election under certain circumstances.

Yet, under the Conservative Party’s own constitution, the caucus gets to appoint an interim leader. If by some chance Cabana’s nomination stands, the Conservative caucus will select not one but two caretaker Premiers in as many months. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have not seen such transient premierships since the 1920s when premiers came and went with the shifting coalitions within the legislature.

Politics in this province is in a parlous state.  The fundamental rot of the whole structure could not be more clearly seen than in the circus that is the once-proud Conservative Party struggling to find someone who actually wants the job while fighting to exclude someone who apparently does.

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Provincial Conservative membership provisions #nlpoli

Here’s a simple discussion of the membership definitions under the current Conservative party constitution in Newfoundland and Labrador:

“Membership has its privileges”

Interestingly enough, Twitter and other bits of the Internet are showing how few supporters of the Conservative party know what their party constitution actually says.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Cabana candidacy causes Connie caucus consternation

Joe Hickey turned out to be a giant jerk-off but Brad Cabana came out of nowhere and scuttled the carefully laid plans among the province’s Conservative back-room boys to crown Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the province’s Conservatives.

Unless the the boys can find some procedural way to disqualify Cabana, the Conservatives will now have to hold a leadership convention. That’s the one thing they were desperately trying to avoid.

More to follow…

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Connie Leadership 2011: the caucus’ worst nightmare

Joe Hickey is considering a challenge to Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the province’s Conservatives.

The Telegram reports Hickey has the cash and the 50 signatures and will announce his intentions on Monday morning.

CBC Radio St. John’s Morning Show has Hickey live at 7:40 AM, Newfoundland and Labrador Daylight Savings Time on Monday. Follow this link – here  - to listen live on Monday.

Update:  NTV is running a story generally similar to the Telly’s account.

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Connie Leadership 2011: for the sake of five large and a gang of kids

Apparently the requirements for membership in the provincial Conservative Party pretty wide.

Might be interesting to see if anyone turns up by noon Monday to challenge Kathy Dunderdale for job of leading the local Connies brigade.

Here’s a warning for all you mainlanders who follow the link: this is not really what a “Reform-based” Conservative Party would look like.  Why Danny Williams ever described the party he used to lead that way remains as much of a mystery as the real reason for his very hasty departure.

The link:  “Membership has its privileges.”

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