And it’s got legs.
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"I am who I am.
That’s Premier Kathy Dunderdale speaking to reporters about comments her benefactor Danny Williams made on Monday about Elizabeth Matthews and the botched effort by Williams, Dunderdale, Matthews and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to get Matthews a six year appointment to the offshore regulatory board.
Williams told CBC on Monday:
In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.
Dunderdale quite rightly blew off Williams’ barb on the aspect of this story that Conservatives are obsessing over. Dunderdale looked stressed in the photo accompanying the CBC story on her scrum. That’s likely because the Matthews debacle has only served to bring to the surface again the internal cleavages in her party.
There’s the Danny-lovers who aren’t happy with Dunderdale’s actions toward their beloved former Saviour. There’s the local Tories who still loathe the federal Tories and resent Dunderdale’s efforts to cuddle up to them during the last federal election. And then there’s the bunch who would just as soon heal the rifts, play with the federal buddies and move along.
And somewhere in there are the wannabe leaders who went along with the temporary ceasefire in the suspended leadership campaign. They are just itching to get it over with so they can get Dunderdale gone.
Somehow, the answer to all that doesn’t seem to be “I yam what I yam and dats all what I yam.”
A pointed rejoinder to Williams would have been for Williams to point that she’s nobody’s baby. Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Dunderdale her nomination. Bullshit, Dunderdale could have said. The former party president didn’t need Williams help to get a nomination. She did it in 1993. She was active in the party during the years when Danny had sent Dean over to the Liberals to help cut some deals.
Lots of things she could have said.
Even a trademark Williams “pfft.”
Truth is, though, Dunderdale knows she sits atop a seething pile of egos, old wounds, resentments and just plain politics. That’s what happens inside any governing party after a while. The fact Danny Williams suppressed the egos and ambitions for seven years screwed the lid on the pressure cooker that much tighter than usual. That’s why the Conservatives who’ve reacted publicly to Williams’ comments have picked up on the Danny gripe. They are looking internally because that’s where things seem to be most unsettled.
The rest of the province is likely looking at what your humble e-scribbler and CBC both saw separately in the same documents: a trio of Tory political types named Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner who could not get their stories straight or match the stories with the facts.
It is as though they never imagined that the whole story might emerge. Complacency kills, they say. Think of it as the eighth deadly sin for bomb disposal experts and political types who manage controversial issues. A moment’s inattention, one skipped step or one unfounded assumption and suddenly you are sailing through the air wondering what the loud noise was.
Think it doesn’t happen?
Consider Dunderdale’s comment about the draft letter Danny Williams had prepared that offered Matthews the job. Dunderdale told reporters she only became aware of it when an access to information request went out. Or worse, as CBC reports it, Dunderdale only knew the letter existed on Monday.
In other words, after it appeared here and CBC broadcast their story.
Those familiar with the goings-on at offices as high as Dunderdale’s will look on that and stare in disbelief.
No amount of spinach can make that sort of thing go away.
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Not content merely to discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews for a seat on the offshore regulatory board, Danny Williams took some pretty heavy shots at his former cabinet members on Monday in a 10 minute interview with the CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates.
In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.
Williams went further.
Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Joan Burke and Kathy Dunderdale nominated, claiming that “in those days it was more of a man’s world.”
You don’t have to read hard to between the lines to see Williams was making a very pointed jab at two key cabinet ministers in his administration.
The fact he is full of crap - as if 2001 was the political stone age in this province - is largely irrelevant.
Interesting too that he mentioned a recent comment about the fact there are very few women seeking office in this election.
But that comment about Matthews and the implicit idea that Dunderdale and Burke owe their place to Williams is not going to sit well with a great many Tories.
Heck, it was so bad that even talk show caller and Danny fan Club charter member Minnie H burned Bill’s ears on Monday night calling Danny down to the dirt for his remarks.
Whatever Dunderdale and company did to Danny after he left, the Old man is certainly going to claim his pound and a half of their hides, one way or the other.
Payback is a mother.
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Anybody who is even vaguely aware of Danny Williams’ attitude to the CBC during his term as Premier will realise what an amazing thing it was for him to sit for 10 minutes on Monday and discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews to sit on the offshore regulatory board.
CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates picked up the story - the same one posted here Monday morning - and added significantly to what might turn out to be a new political mess for the Dunderdale administration.
The new mess though isn’t about a patronage plum Williams lined up for Matthews.
No.
For example, there’s the issue of what Elizabeth Matthews knew about her nomination and appointment and when she knew it. Williams is unequivocal in the full interview on Monday: she would have known about the nomination when he put her name forward.
That contradicts the impression left with a great many people. On March 11, for example, CBC’s Provincial Affairs reported tweeted about a conversation he’d has with Matthews. Cochrane wrote “EM says she has never been told of any appointment.”
After the Liberal opposition released a copy of the order in council Matthews had received making her appointment to the board, Matthews told CBC:
When I received the OC in the mail I contacted the premier's office immediately. I was told ... at the time that the OC was sent in error, and in fact the individual I spoke to was unaware of it,…
The cabinet order itself is unequivocal. Under the first part, cabinet appointed Matthews to the board as a Newfoundland and Labrador representative starting on January 1.
If Matthews was as knowledgeable about these things as Williams claims and if officials of the provincial government knew anything, they’d understand that part of the cabinet order did not need any approval from the federal government.
There’d be no reason for her to misunderstand that she had an appointment to the board when she got the OC in the mail. And even if she and her provincial benefactors wanted to wait until she had the federal agreement on making her the vice-chair as well, that still wouldn’t explain why Matthews claimed she didn’t know about an appointment.
Heck, as your humble e-scribbler reported on Monday, Matthews sent her resume to the Premier’s Office on December 21, apparently in support of the letter to the federal government about her appointment. She knew what was going on. And as Williams made plain on Monday, Matthews knew he was putting her name up for the job.
Then there’s the odd claims by Williams hand-picked successor Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner that they were responsible for Matthews’ nomination and appointment. CBC’s online story includes the quotes they gave in the spring. They wouldn’t do any interviews with CBC on Monday.
Williams made clear that he discussed Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board with Dunderdale as part of the hand-over process. While he didn’t actually make the appointment himself, Williams left the clear impression he told his successor exactly what he wanted to see happen.
Technically, it was up to his successor to get the job done. But there’s no doubt he wanted Matthews in that job and – given the way events unfolded in December over his succession – Williams had plenty of opportunities to push his views right up until the cabinet issued its order on December 21.
And Skinner and Dunderdale delivered for Williams.
Things just came apart in March after someone leaked the story to CBC’s David Cochrane. That’s when Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner started telling versions of events that didn’t jive with what happened.
Apparently, they never imagined the whole story would come out.
Surprise!
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A copy of a draft letter for Williams’ signature, included in a package of information released under the province’s access to information law, bore the date “December 2, 2010”. It concluded:
It is with pleasure that I offer you the position of full-time vice-chairperson of the C-NLOPB, upon expiry of the term of office of the incumbent. Should you accept this offer of employment your appointment would take effect on January 1, 2011 for a term of six years in accordance with applicable legislation.
Williams’ last day on the job was December 3. The letter was never sent, apparently.
Usually, officials prepare a letter making a job offer of this type only after senior officials in the Premier’s Office have reviewed the appointment and discussed it – even if informally - with the prospective appointee. There would be no reason to draft such a letter unless the appointment was finalized.
CBC Provincial Affairs reporter David Cochrane broke the story of Matthews’ appointment on March 2, 2011, some three months later. He didn’t indicate when the provincial government had made the decision to put Matthews forward. It doesn’t appear Cochrane knew.
Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner issued a brief statement the following day confirming that the provincial government had nominated Matthews. Skinner didn’t attach any dates to the decision.
The Liberal Opposition did put dates on it.
On March 11, Opposition Leader Yvonne Jones issued a news release that included a letter from Skinner to his federal counterpart, Christian Paradis. The date on the letter was December 21. It included a three-paragraph biography for Matthews.
In a brief news release later on March 11, Skinner confirmed the letter to Paradis had been sent.
Due to a gaffe in the Liberal office, the Liberal release went out originally without the letter attached. Before the Liberals had a chance to send out the letter, Cochrane posted a comment to Twitter:
(March 11) “Where are you getting this from? Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly. She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment. Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”. [Emphasis added]
That claim – that Matthews “had never been told of any appointment” - became a key element of the story in subsequent days. In hindsight, another part of that comment now stands out as well: “Do Libs have draft letter never sent?”
Matthews withdrew her nomination on March 14. In a prepared statement, Matthews made no mention of the discrepancies in versions of events surrounding the appointment. She blamed her decision on efforts by Liberal leader Yvonne Jones to politicize the issue of her appointment.
In a scrum with reporters the next day, Skinner apparently picked up on the idea Matthews had no knowledge of the appointment. He told reporters that an unspecified breakdown in communications led to a situation and as a result, Matthews apparently didn’t know about the appointment.
CBC’s online story of Skinner’s comments began with this sentence:
A communication breakdown left Elizabeth Matthews in the dark about her appointment to an offshore petroleum board late last year, according to Newfoundland and Labrador's Natural Resources minister.
It included Skinner’s comment:
"I signed the letter. I sent it off and I assumed that the rest of it would have happened as it should have happened, but I'll find that out. There was a communications breakdown in that regard," Skinner said Monday.
The Telegram version of the scrum appeared on March 16. It included a comment from Matthews that she “received an [Order in Council] in the mail in January at which point I contacted the Premier’s Office to inquire about its contents.”
That’s not exactly the same as saying she had “never been told of any appointment”, as Cochrane tweeted on March 11.
Matthews’ comment to the Telegram is vague about whether or not she’d known of the appointment before she got the letter in January. At the time, some might have interpreted her Telegram comments to mean Matthews had been surprised to receive the letter in January and called the Premier’s Office for an explanation.
Existence of a draft letter for Williams’ signature addressed to his then-director of communications as well as the document trail released to the public changes all that.
The package of documents containing the December 2 letter also contained an e-mail exchange between Matthews and the chief of staff in the Premier’s Office and the chief of staff and the deputy minister of natural resources in which Matthews’ forwarded a copy of her resume.
The date of the e-mail exchange was December 21.
Cabinet met the same day to decide on Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board, among other things.
Elizabeth Matthews’ name is on the distribution list for the order.
That’s also the day Skinner wrote his federal counterpart advising of the Matthews appointment.
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Usually when one is in a hole, it is a good idea to stop digging.
There may be exceptions to this rule, but for most occasions, when you can no longer see over the edge of the hole even on your tippee toes, best thing to do is lay the shovel down and start figuring out how to get out of the self-inflicted predicament.
If your friends are in a hole, then you can offer them a hand up out of the hole. Under no circumstances, though, should you start shovelling dirt in on top of them. Jumping in with them may be noble but it is never sensible and if you are in the hole, it is never wise to start pulling the shite back in around your own feet.
Evidently, someone forgot to explain this subtle bit of mystical political knowledge to Premier Kathy Dunderdale.
Instead, Premier (pro tempore) Dunderdale got hold of the Danny and Liz playbook, a portion of which Liz decided to continue this week in her ongoing campaign to destroy whatever shreds of her own dignity she might have left.
Remember that claim about not knowing about the appointment? Well, kiss that nose-puller goodbye when the evidence is unveiled. Elizabeth Matthews told the Telegram that in fact she had a copy of the order in council the Liberals released on Tuesday.
The she tried to turn the whole thing into a process story:
The job of vice-chair of the CNLOPB requires approval from the federal government and Matthews said she was not “informed in any official capacity” that she had been named to the board.
So she knew, but not officially and therefore she didn’t know.
Or did she?
Liz Matthews may well turn out to be the political progeny not of Danny Williams but of Tom “TimeLord” Rideout. Liz knew but didn’t know. Back in 2007, Tom wanted to explain that the Green report recommendations on allowances would come into effect tomorrow but in his world, tomorrow meant six months in the future, not the day after this one.
How in the name of heavens can anyone not wilfully and pathologically blinded by Danny-envy be surprised that the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, the crowd that brought you a low rent version of Doctor Who - Rideout, Hedderson and Marshall editions - and the Abitibi expropriation blunder couldn’t even handle a simple appointment to a board whether out of unfettered lust for patronage or a secret John-Turnerish promise to Danny?
Seriously.
Who is shocked by this?
Didn’t think so.
Unable to hide from the media any longer, the person who actually made the Elizabeth Matthews nomination made a few comments today. The result was, well, let’s just say that when she frigs up Kathy Dunderdale does not settle for half measures. She laid her shovel down alrightee and then dragged in a backhoe just to really bury herself.
Before going any further, let us remember that the core point Dunderdale could have used was simple: appointment’s not done yet. We’ll let you know when and if it is made. That is the same line Matthews could have used and it is the one Shawn Skinner could have tried.
There might have been a bit of a stink about patronage or potential pork-barrelling but it wouldn’t have been half as bad as day after day of the appointee and a senior minister saying things that they both ought to have known were bullshit and that could be shown to be bullshit fairly easily.
Think of it this way: they did not impeach Clinton for a quickie in the closet with a young woman a fraction of his age. They got him for insisting that he had not had sex with that woman and then engaging in some amateur lawyer bullshit about the definition of “is” in order to perpetuate the patently ridiculous denials.
So take a gander at the raw footage of Dunderdale talking to reporters.
Making it up as she goes along
Dunderdale claims there is a regulation requiring first a board appointment and then the second stage of a vice-chair nomination. She then claims that a letter conveys the official appointment.
Dunderdale knows or ought to know this is preposterous. There is no regulation governing the appointment. The Atlantic Accord implementation acts simply state that the nominee for vice chair needs the support of both the federal and provincial governments. If both governments agree on the nomination, a board appointment can follow in due course. Both governments can even agree whether it will be a federal, provincial or joint appointment.
Take a look at the order in council. It is clear that Matthews is appointed with effect from January 1 and that – in addition – cabinet put Matthews forward as a nominee for vice-chair subject to federal agreement. There’s even a reference to negotiating the salary for the vice chair’s job.
Simply put, Dunderdale is wrong. You have to be on the board if you are vice chair but you don’t have to be on the board before becoming vice chair.
Let’s go one step beyond. If, as Dunderdale claims, she never intended Matthews to sit on the board in any capacity other than as vice-chair, the order in council would have been written to say that. More likely, it would have followed the agreement and approved the appointment and salary as already agreed.
Dunderdale defends her nomination of Matthews because she believes the former Williams communications aide is a “strategic thinker” who is articulate. Clearly the events of the past couple of days speak to the contrary impression. Articulate strategic thinkers don’t usually default to easily disprovable crap as the first thought.
Dunderdale claims that the process is not secret, that it has to be straightforward and done in public. The events as they unfolded and Dunderdale’s own account of how things were supposed to happen make her claims about welcoming debate patently false.
Had things unfolded as Dunderdale intended, no one would have learned of the appointment until after it was copper-fastened, to use a hideous Dunderism. Michael Connors of NTV (or so it sounded like) made the point in a question that an appointment to the board announced in December would have sparked controversy. Indeed, it would have.
As for welcoming the chance to defend Matthews, it is almost laughable that both Matthews and Dunderdale talked about their willingness to defend the appointment only after Matthews quit the process and therefore made such a defence unnecessary.
People who genuinely believe they can win don’t quit. It’s that simple. Everything else is nonsense.
As for what really happened, the full story may never emerge. It is possible, for example, that Dunderdale – like her patron and water rights – got caught in a rather amateurish effort to engineer something for Matthews. Heck, maybe the same legal geniuses behind that fiasco and the expropriation cooked up this scheme with their less-than-perfect knowledge of the law and procedure.
Faced with a federal twin vice-chair who might well have wound up as the official replacement for Ruelokke, any other schemes about changing the board using Matthews may well have been scuttled.
Then again, the simple fact that Matthews blew her own feet off with her patently false claims on Friday, coupled with industry and political pushback made the appointment too stinky to survive the very debate Dunderdale supposedly welcomed. Dunderdale and Matthews can talk all the brave talk they want: fact is they lost.
The whole Matthews mess is almost too embarrassingly ridiculous to believe. Had it not unfolded in front of our eyes, anyone could reasonably reject it as too incredible to be true.
[But the fact is] you just cannot make this stuff up.
All we can do is wait to see what Dunderdale does next.
[Updated: corrected typos; subhead clarified; words added in square brackets to clarify sentence.]
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Related:
A few of the people steadfastly supporting the provincial government’s pork-barrel attempt to get Elizabeth Matthews on the offshore regulatory board were left scratching their heads Tuesday evening. [changed verb tense]
Some are so perplexed trying to reconcile their stories with the facts that they are even calling for a public inquiry
The reason is simple. Yet another aspect of the story they have been spreading is blowing away in the face of facts.
The specific bit now boiling off faster than a Japanese reactors’ cooling water is the claim that Elizabeth Matthews didn’t know about her board appointment or that her appointment included a seat on the board, depending on how you interpret the comments.
On Friday, Matthews responded to a Liberal opposition news release that noted she was appointed to the offshore board on December 21 with effect from January 1, 2011. CBC provincial affairs reporter David Cochrane tweeted a series of comments on this, including comments about Matthews:
(March 11) “Where are you getting this from? Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly. She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment. Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”.
Cochrane put Matthews’ comments to Shawn Skinner in a scrum on Monday. Skinner agreed that Matthews hadn’t been notified and that’s the story CBC ran with on Tuesday. Skinner also mentioned that the appointment needed an order in council but insisted that Matthews didn’t know about the appointment.
Well, the order in council clinches it:
If you look on the left-hand side of the document, you will see the list of people to whom officials of the cabinet secretariat distributed the order. “P” is the Premier. The Natural Resources and Public Service Secretariat deputy ministers got copies, as did the Attorney General, the Deputy Clerk of the Executive Council and the file.
And so did someone named E. Matthews.
Just so that everyone understands just how crucial this document is, understand that the order in council is one of the basic legal instruments of our system of government. You can find a handy definition of what an order in council is over at the Privy Council Office website along with a searchable database of these public documents.
To paraphrase, an order in council is a legal instrument made by the cabinet, called the Lieutenant Governor in Council, by powers given by a law or, less frequently, the royal prerogative. In most provinces, orders in council are made on the recommendation of the responsible minister and take legal effect only when signed by the Lieutenant Governor.
They don’t get back-dated. And they damn well don’t get left sitting idly around somewhere unattended. The people who handle these things are nothing if not diligent to the point of anal retentivism about making sure everything is done just so. That’s not a knock on them; to the contrary, the people in the Executive Council office are among the most trustworthy and responsible people anywhere on the planet.
They don’t shag up, as a rule.
And in this case, they’d have extra incentive not to make a mistake. As Shawn Skinner pointed out on Monday, these appointments belong entirely to the Premier. Kathy Dunderdale gets to make them just like her predecessor Danny Williams did. That isn’t what happened before 2003, by the way.
If Kathy picked Liz, then there’d be hell to pay if Liz did not know that she could start earning cash come the New Year.
Nor is it really plausible that Kathy Dunderdale, Shawn Skinner or any of their senior staff might have buggered up and not mentioned to Liz she had a seat on the board.
Nor is it likely that they thought one didn’t happen without the other. Shawn Skinner’s been pretty clear since Monday that they considered it a two-stage process, but stage one happened in December.
The order in council makes the appointment to the board first. Then it puts Matthews forward as a vice-chair, subject to federal approval. That’s what Skinner told reporters on Monday. As it turned out, the feds made a counter-offer to accept Matthews contingent on the province accepting a second vice-chair by federal appointment.
Nor is it likely David Cochrane either misunderstood what Matthews told him or made a fairly consistent mistake in conveying it via Twitter or anywhere else. Matthews relayed what he got and consistently put the comments to Skinner.
Now Liz may have misunderstood what was going on, but that’s a different – and entirely possible – thing.
For something like this, Matthews would have been entitled to attend any board meetings after January 1, 2011 and participate like any other member. The only thing that hadn’t been settled up to the time she bailed on the whole thing was the second part of the order. That is, the federal government had not agreed to her appointment to the vice-chair’s job.
But her board appointment on behalf of the province?
Full legal effect on December 21.
With Matthews’ decision to bail on the appointment, the whole vice-chair position at the board is up in the air. The idea of two vice-chairs appears to have been nothing more than an effort to have a federal appointee to offset Matthews.
With her appointment now dead, there’s an opportunity for both St. John’s and Ottawa to agree on an open competition to be followed by an appointment based on qualifications and merit.
If nothing else, it’s got to beat the hell out of yet another complete disaster - remember Andy Wells? - that its proponents have been forced to defend with what amount to claims of their own bungling and incompetence.
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Elizabeth Matthews is bailing out of her controversial nomination to serve as vice-chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore petroleum Board.
It isn’t clear if she is also leaving her appointment to the board itself.
As CBC reports, Matthews is blaming the Opposition Liberals for politicising the entire matter. Matthews served as a communications director for the Liberal administration of Roger Grimes before she left quickly to work for Danny Williams in the Opposition office where he was infamous for slinging wild, political accusations. In another ironic twist, Matthews former boss said he got into politics because he was sick of all the patronage and corruption.
The big twist in the story appears to have come on Friday when the Liberals revealed a December 21 letter from natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to his federal counterpart appointing Matthews to the offshore with effect from 01 January 2011.
And then things went horribly wronger Update:
The Telegram has the full text of Matthews’ statement. For starters, try and find the clear statement where she says she is quitting her appointment. Then check and see if she has actually launched any defamation action given her references to defamation. This sounds suspiciously like John Hickey suing Roger Grimes for stuff Danny Williams said: a huge pile of smoke to cover the catastrophe everyone else sees.
If that wasn’t enough, note, among other things, the change in her title in the Premier’s Office from the bio sketch in the letter on the appointment – “Senior Policy Advisor” - to “a senior advisor”. There’s a huge difference in the two. That’s just the tip of that iceberg.
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Flip back to the provincial government news release archive for last December and there’s one thing you won’t see: an announcement appointing Elizabeth Matthews to occupy a provincial seat on the offshore regulatory board.
That’s because they didn’t issue an announcement despite sending the federal government a letter advising the feds of the provincial appointment. You can find the letter online at the Official Opposition’s website. They got it from the provincial natural resources department.
In the second paragraph of the letter, natural resources minister Shawn Skinner also nominates Matthews as vice-chair of the offshore regulatory board. That’s something the federal government would have to agree to. Apparently they did but only on the condition that the province accept a federal second vice-chair.
One huge difference between the two vice-chairs, incidentally is that the federal one actually was a senior policy advisor in a previous life. The biographical sketch of Elizabeth Matthews was evidently written by someone in the latter stages of advanced pinochiosis. For example, the bio sketch talks about a re-negotiation of the Atlantic Accord. That never happened so it would be pretty hard for Matthews to have been involved in it at all, let alone at the level the writer claimed.
There’s a story in Saturday’s Telegram on this but sadly it isn’t online. The story includes some quotes from a bizarro news release Skinner issued on Friday, supposedly to correct information in the Liberal release that went out along with Skinner’s letter to the feds.
The bizarro thing is that he didn’t actually correct anything. Instead, Skinner confirmed what the Liberals said. he also did a bit of a nose-puller when he claimed that the provincial government had to appoint Matthews to the board in order to nominate her as vice chair.
Think of that as being a chicken-and-egg version. Before now, the federal and provincial governments could successfully agree on an appointment as vice-chair before making an announcement. The board seat was secondary. In this case, the provincial government apparently tried to push Matthews forward with a seat on the board and then tried to cut the deal on the vice-chair’s job.
Surprise. Surprise.
The feds didn’t play along and put forward their own nominee for a second spot in a “I’ll take yours but only if you take mine too” kinda deal.
Both bits of that – the provincial ploy and the federal counter - likely have a lot to do with the fact that Matthews is basically a patronage appointee with no relevant qualifications to take on the vice-chair’s job. She can’t really hold a candle to either the current or former chair and she’s outclassed experientially speaking by the guy she was supposedly replacing. Had the provincial government opted for a meritorious appointment perhaps with an open competition they might have found one of several qualified women from the province to take the job.
Word of Matthews’ appointment leaked out about three or four weeks ago in the province’s oil community. It caused a great deal of consternation. A few weeks after word started to spread, CBC’s David Cochrane reported it. He only gave the bare bones of the basic story though. Apparently CBC isn’t reporting the rest of these details as they’ve come to light. It will be interesting to see if anyone adds new details to the story this week or if this is really the end of the story.
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Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and it wouldn’t take you very long to write down the names of men and women from the private or public sector who are qualified by their experience to take on the job of vice-chair at the federal-provincial agency that regulates the offshore industry.
Limit the list to just women and you’d still have a fair number of very capable people.
Elizabeth Matthews - Danny Williams’ former communications director - wouldn’t be on the list anywhere.
She wouldn’t be left out of consideration because she isn’t smart or capable in her own right. It’s just that she lacks the experience necessary for the job.
It’s that simple.
By proposing to appoint the unqualified Matthews as vice chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, Kathy Dunderdale has shown exactly the same tendency to propose unqualified people for very important jobs her patron had. Andy Wells, the former mayor of St. John’s is perhaps the best example of that.
However, Andy Wells is surely not the only example of an appointment that left many people scratching their heads in bewilderment or – as again with the Matthews appointment – setting teeth on edge in the province’s oil industry. They might have understood appointing Danny Williams’ former chief of staff who is also looking for a new gig now that Williams has left politics. At least, Brian Crawley had work experience in the industry on the Hibernia project. For the past couple of weeks though, the movers and shakers in the local oil patch are shaking their heads at the sort of appointment one might find in some banana republic rather than in a Canadian jurisdiction that aspires to be among the world leaders in regulating a complex industry.
Conservatives are trotting out the idea that Matthews will somehow change the communications practices at the board because of her work experience. The board already has a competent and experience public relations practitioner, for one thing and Matthews certainly isn’t needed for that. What’s more important to realise in that regard is that, as others have pointed out, Matthews helped to create and sustain one of the most secretive political machines in the province’s history.
What both the provincial [and] federal governments ought to have done in this case is what the position warrants: an open competition in which the successful candidate is appointed based on merit. That’s how such a senior position ought to be filled. That’s how they filled the chairman’s job a few years. The process wound up a mess [in that case] simply because Danny Williams intervened to try and foist his blatantly unqualified whim onto a process that was supposed to be driven by merit. Just because the law says appointments like this are made by cabinet does not mean that they must be handed out as patronage plums.
Merit ought to count for much more that it does with the current provincial administration.
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* Corrections in square brackets
