‘Engagement’ can be an excuse for avoiding action #nlpoli

by Craig Westcott

The Ball administration is off to a shaky start. Actually, it seems afraid to start at all. Tuesday’s press conference announcing 15 months of public consultation on how to handle the deficit is another indication that this administration is afraid to act. To use a tired cliché, the Liberals are like the dog that caught the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.

 Granted, the party has only been in power about a month, with much of that month being down time due to Christmas and the New Year’s holidays. But the Liberals had plenty of time to prepare an action plan. It has been obvious for the past two years that they would inherit the new government. That’s why the lack of a transition plan is so perplexing.

 Ball and his ministers need to send signals, already overdue, that they are changing the way we “do government.”

An opportunity to feel like we’re part of the country again #nlpoli #cdnpoli

This is Craig Westcott’s editorial from The Pearl newspaper, reproduced with permission.. 

This is a tough column to write. Taking an editorial position in favour of one candidate over another when both have worked so hard in this election isn’t as easy as some partisans on either side might think.

My opinion is tempered by the experience of having run myself, back in 2008, when I didn’t stand a snot of a chance as the Conservative candidate in the federal election against the NDP’s Jack Harris, who had the full weight and force of Danny Williams’ popularity and provincial PC machine behind him.

As I said at the time, I ran not so much for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as against Danny Williams’ ABC campaign and his bid to isolate Newfoundland even farther from the political mainstream of this country.

Muskrat Falls propaganda a no-brainer #nlpoli

From the latest issue of the Irish Loop Post, Craig Westcott’s editorial “You won’t strain your brain reading government’s last minute batch of Muskrat Falls propaganda.”

There is more to read in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue than Nalcor’s electricity demand forecast, according to Craig.

The problem with the Liberal Party #nlpoli

Guest post by Craig Westcott, from his editorial in this week’s Business Post.

If, as its president Judy Morrow has proposed, the Liberal Party puts off holding a leadership convention for two years, it will be making a serious, possibly ruinous mistake.

Like that one lonely turbot once described by then Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin as clinging to the Grand Banks by its fingernails, the Liberals are on the verge of extinction, despite its retention of Opposition status in the House of Assembly.

Tuesday’s CRA poll results confirm that.

For three consecutive quarters the NDP has marched upwards, standing solidly now in second place, its lack of Opposition status only temporary perhaps until the first by-election.

The bald truth is that nothing will get done to rebuild the Liberal Party without a real leader to push it. An interim leader won’t cut it, unless it’s someone of the ability of Bob Rae who is rebuilding the federal party while maintaining interim leader status. But Rae is an exception to the rule. There are no Bob Raes in the Liberal Party of Newfoundland, at least none that are obvious.

At the risk of telling tales out of school, I was shocked when I took the job as communications director for the Official Opposition last fall to learn there was no party apparatus backing the caucus. The fabled Big Red Machine no longer existed in this province. And even if it had existed, with a $700,000 to $800,000 deficit at the banks, there was no money to put gas in to run it.

There was no party membership list, there weren’t even district associations in most districts. Only for the work of long time MHA Roland Butler, who has perhaps the best organizational smarts in the party, there would have been no district associations in place to fight this past fall’s provincial election.

The sad truth was that little to no grassroots rebuilding had been done since the Liberals lost the disastrous campaign of 2007.

For most of the four years between elections, the leader retained interim status. For part of the time, until Morrow was elected party president, the executive headed by Danny Dumeresque was said by some in the party to be more determined to undermine interim leader Yvonne Jones than support her.

It was a mess. The view throughout the party was that as long as Danny Williams was leading the PCs, the Liberals didn’t have a chance of regaining government anyway, a mistaken view to those with knowledge of history. Joey eventually lost the confidence of the people and I believe Williams would have too, only much sooner than the 23 years it took Joey to crash. A more contemporary example, is Vladimir Putin, like Williams a wildly popular, dictatorial egomaniac while in office, who is now losing the confidence of the Russian people. Time brings down all dictators eventually, if death doesn’t get them first.

But I digress.

The problem with the Liberals is both a failure of leadership – on the party executive side as well as within the caucus - and also a matter of unfortunate circumstance.

During the year I spent with the Liberal caucus, it had only four members. The leader, Yvonne Jones, was off for much of that time, taking cancer treatment, though still involved with the running of the Opposition office. Another member, Butler, had his own health issue to face and was unable to participate in as much of the daily hurly burly as he wished. The other two members, Kelvin Parsons and Marshall Dean, had districts at the exact opposite ends of the island from St. John’s: One centred in Port aux Basques, 900 kilometres away, the other on the Great Northern Peninsula, situated even farther. When the House wasn’t sitting, which was often, they had to be in their districts tending to constituency matters. That meant they were unavailable to the television media in St. John’s (though full marks to Kelvin Parsons for beating it back and forth across the TransCanada every week to fill in for Jones and still take care of his constituents. If there was a prize for the hardest working man in politics last year, Parsons would have earned it).

Down the hall, the sole NDP member - the intelligent, earnest and hardworking Lorraine Michael - was in Confederation Building every day to take media calls. No sweat for her in that regard: Her seat was located in the city.

While a number of PC friends of mine have blamed the NDP surge in St. John’s on Danny Williams’ federal ABC campaign, which drove thousands of long time Tories into the Dippers’ camp, Michael deserves as much credit for also showing up for the media every day, especially when nobody from the Liberal office was available.

The situation for the current Liberal caucus is no better, despite the fact it has two more seats than last year. That’s because not one of the Liberal MHAs are from St. John’s or even the Avalon Peninsula. Two are from Labrador and the four others all have seats west of Deer Lake. The NDP, meanwhile, has five members, every one of them in St. John’s. Who do you think is going to win the war for media attention between now and the next general election in 2015?

And yet, the Liberal Party’s problems are not that hard to fix. It could probably write off all that debt by making a simple offer of 10 cents on the dollar to the banks. The debt is getting so old now it has probably been written off by the lenders on their own books already.

The party needs a full time organizer to rebuild and maintain the district associations, the basic battle units in any election.

It needs to take its head out of the water on the fishery and adopt a strategy that makes sense, resisting its outdated, overplayed, knee jerk habit of barking at the processors and shouting out support, but no real answers, for the plant workers and harvesters at all costs. Here’s a news flash gang: The fishery doesn’t decide elections anymore. There are so few people left working in the industry now, their votes can’t sway a campaign. And almost everyone in the industry is sick of being poor. They want change. Offer it to them. The PC government isn’t. That’s how you will win fishery votes.

And realize this: You can’t win the next election without winning St. John’s. So drop this rural/urban divide malarkey and devise some policies that will benefit the Avalon.

Finally, the Liberals have to regain some pride. The Grits have a good story to tell, if only they would tell it. Newfoundland’s current prosperity is due in large part to Liberal Premiers Clyde Wells and Roger Grimes, the guys who negotiated the three energy deals - as well as Voisey’s Bay – that are filling the government’s coffers. The crowd running the show now had nothing to do with any of it. And if Kathy Dunderdale implements this disastrous Muskrat Falls deal, the PC’s will destroy their chances of winning re-election next time around.

So there’s a lot to build for. But nothing will happen without a real leader to drive it. Waiting until 2013 will be too late. Find a leader now and have him or her ready to win a seat in the first by-election that comes up in 2012. Because if you lose that one to the NDP, the Liberal Party is finished.

If you stop writing yourselves off, maybe the rest of the province will too.

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Kremlinology 27: Going negative early has its risks

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can be forgiven this week if they thought they’d entered the savage world of American politics complete with its intense and highly orchestrated personal attacks.

While the 2011 provincial election campaign has been underway since last spring, the provincial Conservatives went negative this week with a pre-emptive attack on the Liberal party.  The pretext for the attack was the opposition office’s new communications director, Craig Westcott.

Conservative leader Danny Williams was characteristically blunt in justifying both the attack itself and the violation of the province’s privacy laws by the release of an e-mail Westcott wrote to the Premier’s office in February 2009.

I did feel it was important that the people of the province know who they’re dealing with and what they’re dealing with when this man is now an integral part of the official opposition in this province.

The task of leading the attack went to Kevin O’Brien, recently promoted from a low-level portfolio to the slightly more demanding job of municipal affairs. O’Brien noted the idea as well of letting people know what  - supposedly - they could expect from the Liberals:

It's sad really to see the Opposition take that path because what I see is a fellow that can't even contain himself with regard to expressing that hatred."

These statements stand out because they characterise something that had not occurred.  Both Williams and O’Brien drew attention to what they considered Westcott’s personal “hatred” for the Premier. 

Westcott has been characteristically blunt in his criticism of Williams, but his comments have been typically not as personal as Williams presents them.  And sure, Westcott made plain  - before he started the job – that he was concerned about Williams’ impact on politics and the potential the Williams’ Conservatives could win all 48 seats in the provincial legislature.  But at the point O’Brien mentioned the e-mail, the opposition itself hadn’t gone anywhere near negative.

Interestingly, Westcott described Williams accurately in 2007:

it's impossible to avoid being negative about a leader who is so negative himself, especially about his critics and some of the people who try to do business in this province.

And Williams and his crowd took great offense at anything and everything Westcott said.  For his part, Westcott released a raft of e-mails with Williams’ communications director at a time when Westcott published a local newspaper and couldn’t get an interview with Williams. Westcott ran for the federal Conservatives in 2008, largely as a personal gesture in reaction to Williams’ anti-Harper crusade.  One of the consequences is that CBC stopped using him as a commentator after the election.

That isn’t just background for the most recent shots in an ongoing personal feud,  nor does it suggest that both sides are equally guilty of anything. Westcott started his new job on Monday morning.  On Wednesday, the Conservatives launched the assault. Until then, there was nothing other than the known animosity between Westcott and Williams. The point to note is that the Conservatives characterised what Westcott and the Liberals would do in the future. 

But that prediction – and all the negative implications – are entirely a fiction created by Williams’ Conservatives.

Going negative isn’t something new for Williams.  He likes the ploy and has used it on everyone from Stephen Harper to a previously unknown lawyer named Mark Griffin.  Around the same time Westcott sent the now infamous – and previously private – e-mail, Williams labelled Griffin a traitor.  Williams also started a lengthy battle with the Globe and Mail over a column that speculated about Williams’ possible motives in expropriating assets from three private companies in central Newfoundland.

Nor is it the first time Williams has tried to put words into someone else’s mouth.  in the most famous episode cabinet minister John Hickey sued then opposition leader Roger Grimes for defamation.  The case quietly disappeared because Hickey sued Grimes not for what Grimes said but for what Williams attributed to Grimes.

The provincial Conservatives are a tough and effective political organization.  They bring message discipline and zeal to the table. On top of that they have an army of enthusiastic sock puppets who will fill any Internet space and radio talk show with pre-programmed lines. Going nasty and negative is second nature to them.

The curious thing about the episode is that Williams could easily have waited until the first lump of mud came hurling his way. 

But he didn’t.

He sent O’Brien out as his crap flinger, first.

Taking the first shot, going negative in this way, this early in a campaign would be a risky venture in any case in Newfoundland and Labrador. Most voters aren’t engaged in politics and the overwhelming majority aren’t thinking about the election yet.  Local politics is anything but the highly competitive, ideologically-divided wasteland of the United States. People don’t like taking the battle-axe to the heads of their neighbours and friends. 

Politics can be competitive, but heavily negative campaigning doesn’t bring any great benefits.  Going negative early carries a risk of alienating people from the Conservatives and from politics generally. And it’s not like Williams has a surplus of voter support he can afford to tick off with negative campaigning.  He won in 2003 and again in 2007 with about the same number of votes, about the same share of total eligible vote.  That’s because Williams’ voters consist of a core of traditional Conservative supporters plus a group of voters who have voted for other parties, usually Liberal, in the past.  

For someone with Williams’ reputation, however, there is the added danger that yet more relentless negativity will affect his own support. Voters may not be able to stomach a full year of his highly concentrated political bile on top of the seven years they’ve already witnessed. Even Conservatives have been known to revolt against Williams’ diktats.  In 2008, Conservatives in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl voted heavily for the New Democratic Party, despite the fact that four prominent cabinet ministers campaigned for the Liberal. In other ridings, they just stayed home in response to Williams’ personal anti-Harper crusade.

There are signs that voters, generally, in some parts of the province are discontented if not slightly cranky. Williams’ Conservatives have already started trying to mollify concerns over some issues. Public money is flowing freely in announcements about spending for new outdoor basketball courts or cassettes for x-ray machines.  A news conference heralding a new case of DVDs or a packet of screws can’t be far behind. 

The provincial Conservatives have also telegraphed that they are worried about voter attitudes toward the party, generally. Maybe it wouldn’t take much to see the sort of rejection of the Conservatives that happened in the Straits and White Bay North spread to other districts along the northeast coast and other parts of central and western Newfoundland and into Labrador.

In a sense, going negative early suggests the Conservatives are particularly sensitive about any prospect that a resurgent Liberal Party might be able to capitalise on voter discontent. It reinforces the idea that Williams’ personal smear of Marystown mayor Sam Synyard had more to do with a fear of political rivals than anything else.

In the insider baseball world of political reporting in this province, this week’s drama about an e-mail and a communications director may looks like one thing to some people.  But if you look more closely, another picture may appear.

No matter what, the next 12 months could bring some of the most interesting political developments in years.

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Outside the Overpass Update:  The Overpass is to Newfoundland and Labrador politics as the beltway is to American federal politics.  In that light, consider this e-mail from the province’s other daily that puts the week’s game of insider baseball in perspective:  “Get back to work”.

Going negative this early has its risks.

Priorities

With a chance to pose a question to the Prime Minister about troubles in search and rescue, CBC opted to ask Stephen Harper about his relationship with Danny Williams instead.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the acing Opposition leader about why his office had hired an experienced journalist  - known not to swallow the Premier’s crap as if it were candy -  to serve as communications director for the Opposition Office, a CBC radio host wanted to know how that might affect the Opposition’s relationship with Danny Williams.   

Nice to know the Mother Corp has its news priorities in order.

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Electoral shocks and nots

Shock:  Newspaper editor Craig Westcott's the federal Conservative candidate in St. John's East. If you want an ox gored, then call Craig. He is best known locally for his criticism of Premier Danny Williams. That criticism earned Westcott some notoriety.

Not:  Former auditor general and provincial cabinet minister Beth Marshall is out.

Not:  Former provincial New Democratic Party leader Jack Harris will run for the Orange in St. John's East.

Shock:  Merv Wiseman, current president of the fur breeders association and former president of the provincial agriculture federation, is running for the federal Conservatives and hammering the Green Shift in his first foray into the media.  Wiseman tried for the Provincial Conservative nod in the recent Baie Verte White Bay by-election and lost.

Meanwhile, the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is running for the Liberals.

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Unfashionably frank, closer to home

Craig Westcott, publisher editor and just about everything at the Business Post is now blogging.

The Public Ledger

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The future of rural Newfoundland

Craig Westcott's latest commentary for CBC radio [ram file] and Merv Wiseman's reaction. [ram file].

Westcott was his usual bold self. He called for government to stop paying lip service to problems, to stop "conning people" into believing that some bureaucratic plan built on a theatre festival will save things.

He notes that the salvation of rural Newfoundland would be creating a pool of skilled workers. Out of those educated young people will come the source of new ideas or people who can change and adapt more readily than their forebears.

Wiseman is an excellent proponent of the reactionary approach, rooted in the old rural development movement that infiltrated the economic development boards and turned them, in too many cases, from producers of results based on local opportunities to producers of government grant applications for further studies into the magical properties of another blueberry festival or golf course.

Wiseman essentially spouts buzzwords like innovation as if throwing up a few whalebones and calling it a museum actually gets at the core of the issue. He misses entirely the educational and demographic challenges that are already here in many parts of the province.

A clue to his headspace? Wiseman refers to the consequences of Newfoundland dieing, not rural Newfoundland but Newfoundland, as if what was in the mythical idyllic past is all that ever was and ever can be.

His major thrust was that Westcott was being too negative. That's it. Too negative. As if smiling and denying would suffice for anything except convincing people that you were in need of therapy.

There was nothing in Wiseman's comments to deal with the substance of the issue, namely the changes that will come - some inevitably - in the mythical entity Wiseman and Westcott call rural Newfoundland.

At least Westcott did that with his comments on education. Rather than seeking to hang on to as much of what was and is, Westcott talked about the simple foundation for adaptability. He pointed correctly to the value of education in building successful economies - and societies - in a host of places from Iceland to Asia.

Education was a key idea component in development ideas 15 years ago. More scholar for the dollar, as then education minister Phil Warren called it. Education reform in the early 1990s was about giving our young people the tools they need to build their own lives and with that their province and the future.

By the late 1990s though, and continuing today, education decisions were often about keeping schools in communities with fewer an fewer children as a symbol of the community's future. Keeping more and more teachers teaching fewer and fewer children with resource spread around such that the overall quality of education stayed about the same.

More dollar. Less scholar.

And Merv Wiseman? Well, he never really had any concrete, positive actions to show what is going on.

If they are out there and Wiseman had talked about them, he'd have been far more convincing than accusing Westcott of patronizing people.

Patronizing them is what the old rural development crowd do all the time with their talk. And if that's all they have, then Newfoundland and Labrador generally, not just the rural bits, is doomed.

Is the goal a 1948 do-over referendum?

The National Post this Easter weekend contains a little profile of Premier Danny Williams.

There are a few factual errors, but nothing that undermines the core point of the piece. Overall, there is a summary of the current state of the erstwhile nation of Dannyland. The picture isn't good. There's no way to make it good and it is the branding of this province as Dannyland that ultimately undermines whatever the triffid logo thing could possibly do.

A look at Newfoundland's history through a local lens explains why Mr. Williams' attacks on big business and Ottawa play so well around the kitchen tables of Gander and Corner Brook. Dragged into Confederation by the narrowest margin, the formerly independent colony has been rewarded with collapsed cod stocks, a hydro deal that virtually donates electricity to Quebec (which resells it to Americans for a tidy profit), two generations of talented young people decamping for work in Alberta and elsewhere, and the largest per capita debt and highest unemployment in Canada.

Cynics outside the province might suggest Newfoundlanders had something to do with bad economic planning, but locally, says Mr. [John] Crosbie, the feeling is "we're always being outsmarted and done in by mainlanders."

Since this piece was written by a mainlander, he can be forgiven for assuming every single person on what the Post calls The Rock - a word destined to join the other "n" word on the list of banned ethnic slurs - buys into the nationalist mythology on which the latest caudillo thrives.

Rick Mercer, no longer living here, can also be forgiven for mistaking the appearance of near-unanimity back home as a sign that there is, in fact, near unanimous agreement with the Premier's goals even if there is a quibble about tactics. If we define the goal as motherhood and blueberry duff, then that would be true.

But it isn't the goal and so there are growing questions that run deeper than the correctness of the Premier's rant-du-jour. What exactly is this "fair share" Williams keeps talking about? What would a better deal on oil or Confederation look like so we can help spot it when it shows up? Williams himself apparently has no idea and so Newfoundlanders and Labradorians increasingly wonder what he is up to.

Is he planning to create the climate in which the fall election will turn into a referendum on Confederation? Is the first townie premier to run the place since well before the townies put 'er up on the rocks in 1934 going to take give the nationalist townies a do-over on the 1948 referendum? Only his man in the Blue Line cab likely knows for sure.

Since we are on the subject of wider goals, Offal News returns to that issue today. The cause is confirmation from the oil industry that there are no talks going on with the provincial government regarding Hebron. It isn't like Simon Lono has said that before, and been right. it is that Williams has suggsted there were talks going on - yet again - and yet again, the facts are something else.

Once you are done there, take a glance at nottawa. Mark Watton notes - riffing on the Post piece - that Williams makes much of the idea that he is on a self-less mission of good, that he doesn't need the job of Premier because he is independently wealthy.

nottawa points out that anywhere else in the a country a federal politician who tried the same sanctimonious, self-serving line on the press gallery, they would - to use a local phrase - have his guts for garters. He's absolutely correct.

What the Post doesn't say, though, likely because of their interview subjects, is that the demagogues of post-Confederation Newfoundland all wound up chased from office in some measure of public disrepute. At the risk of blasphemy, the same people who threw palm fronds to line the path of their newest saviour were among the first to line his via dolorosa and jeer.

Smallwood.

Peckford.

Tobin.

It is a short list, distinguished by nothing else if only by the volume of spittle ejected by anyone mentioning their name these days.

Danny Williams knows it.

That's one of the reasons why he reputedly detests the comparisons to people like Smallwood.

That's why - only three years into his mandate, Williams has already announced he'll be packing it in soon. That's why he is hunting for some sort of legacy, some sort of brand, other than the one he has already claimed for himself.

It's too late of course.

On this Easter weekend, and in the religion of Newfoundland politics, we need only wonder who will be playing the role of Barabas in the latest version of the pageant.

The view from here and there

Check out this posting on Craig Westcott's speech.

Small dead animals is a leading Conservative blog.

The real meat in this one can be found in the comments, especially those by Newfoundlanders and Labradorians not currently living in the province.

(h/t to labradore.)

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