David Cochrane called it right the other day in the scrum with Kathy Dunderdale. He asked if she was laying the groundwork for a failure at the trade talks, a failure of her personal position.
Dunderdale denied it in the scrum, but her latest claim – full of the same vague and largely unsubstantiated claims as on Monday – sounds like someone who is trying to blame someone else before the talks finish and the end result doesn’t match what she’s been personally staking out as a position.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale (via NTV):
We’re looking for a ‘carve-out’ on the minimum processing regulations … so they’ll be exempted, and we want access to the European market on a number of our fish lines…
Carve out.
Hideous jargon for “not going to trade away” minimum processing regulations.
Period.
Fisheries minister Derrick Dalley (via the Telegram):
Fisheries Minister Derrick Dalley was at a media event in St. John’s Tuesday, where he assured reporters that the provincial government is not going to give away minimum processing requirements unless it’s a good deal.
Not going to trade away minimum processing requirements.
Oh wait.
There’s more.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale said on Tuesday that the province will have problems now that it doesn’t have a federal cabinet minister from this province.
As CBC quoted her from a scrum outside the House of Assembly, Kathy said:
“It always makes it more difficult when you don't have somebody inside the tent,…”
This is not just a difficult position, it is a stupid position, but it is exactly the stupid policy that Kathy Dunderdale advocated.
First, slander is something defamatory that someone says.
Libel is what you call a defamatory comment that is printed. So a poster would be a libel since it is printed.
Second, the story on the VO website about a bunch of posters contains an editorial opinion, not a fact, when it says that the posters “slander” the Premier.
“Who wants Kathy Dunderdale as Premier?” is hardly defamatory. The last line on the poster is strong, saying that the Premier is a “source of shame for us all.”
Unless the bad words on the poster that you edited out for the website say something really awful, it sure doesn’t look like you have something defamatory. As it turns out, the words are reputedly “Liar, Bully, and Fool”.
Strong but it is still looking like an opinion and not a defamation.
Best thing for VOCM to do: leave the opinions to others, like say a lawyer or a judge, and stick to reporting the news.
Third, this poster seems to be something we could reasonably expect after last week’s events. That doesn’t mean it is right. It just means that the botched attack on Gerry Rogers and the Facebook group might just be getting some people a bit more riled up than they would be otherwise.
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The Premier’s daughter tweeted this comment last Wednesday night.
Few people consider the impact that political life has on the families of politicians and political staffers. Steve Paikin’s book The Dark Side deals with it, as SRBP noted in 2006.
That tweet is a reminder of that.
Here’s some advice for the Premier’s daughter from an old political hand.
The Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador are politically deaf. They only hear themselves.
Former fisheries minister Trevor Taylor used his Telegram column on Monday to issue a few hypocritical tut tuts about the state of public discussion in the province.
Too negative he whined, sounding for all the world like someone was holding a small dog turd under his nose as he typed. His political pals on da Twitter chimed in as they are programmed to do.
Shortly after 1:30, government house leader Darin King rose in the House on a point of order. He wanted the Speaker to suspend Gerry Rogers from the House of Assembly not for something Rogers said or even endorsed but merely because her name appeared on a group critical of government on which some moron had posted threats against the Premier.
The Tories sealed the triple play when Speaker Ross Wiseman ruled that while there was no evidence on the face of it that Rogers was guilty of endorsing the threats, he would invent a reason to condemn her anyway.
They are blind, too.
Even at the worst of their leadership feuding Jean Chretien and Paul Martin never frigged each other over the way Kathy Dunderdale and Jerome Kennedy did last week.
While Kennedy was trying to tell everyone that the justice reversal wasn’t going to happen to all the cuts, Dunderdale (right, poppy eyes and all) was on the open line shows and everywhere else someone had a microphone, telling us that if people could make “compelling arguments” she’d have another look at the budget cuts.
What is a “compelling argument”, you might ask?
No one knows.
At any rate, renovations planned long in advance — to keep the legislature from falling apart — are hardly a fair target for criticism.This conclusions assume one thing not actually disclosed in media reports on the need to relocate three floors of the Confederation Building tower and another thing that’s actually preposterous.
It’s fair to say if the Opposition’s roof was leaking, they’d be singing a different tune.
If you want to see a politician under significant stress, take a look at Kathy Dunderdale talking to reporters about her party’s heavily organized effort to goose unscientific, online polls.
Her voice is high pitched.
She’s moving around.
And she’s got Marty Feldman Eyes.
CBC’s David Cochrane contacted the public works department* Premier’s Office and asked about rumours he’d heard of renovations to the Premier’s Office.
As Cochrane reported on Twitter, the public works department Premier’s Office told him that there were no renovations currently happening.
Not exactly true, as it turned out.
Right after Ross Reid’s new job, Jerome Kennedy’s trip back to the finance ministry was the second most overblown story of the past week or so.
Most seem to think Kennedy is headed back to finance in order to tackle the public sector unions as part of the upcoming budget. That gives a bit too much credit to the individual in all this. The budget isn’t handled by one person: it is the productive of collective action by a committee of ministers called the treasury board and ultimately by cabinet.
As the recent Telegram editorial on Kennedy’s appointment noted, the budget is all but finished at this point. They are absolutely right. What has normally happened in January since 2003 is essentially about the government delivering some kind of message or other. In January 2008, part of the message was about a pile of new spending right after the 2007 election. And then right on the heels of that - in the same year - was finance minister Tom Marshall and his debt clock warning about impending financial doom.
Sound familiar?
Premier Kathy Dunderdale wants to have a “conversation” about the provincial government’s financial mess and the ways we might fix it. That’s what she told CBC’s David Cochrane in her year-end interview.
One of the things Kathy wants to talk about is taxes, specifically the number of people not paying the bulk of the taxes the provincial government collects.
Kathy doesn’t really want to have a conversation, of course. Kathy likes jargon. She uses jargon a lot. She thinks it makes her sound smart. It never has. Kathy uses jargon so much that It just makes her sound like someone trying to sound smart.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale, quoted in the Globe and Mail in a story on sanctioning of the Hebron project:
Our goal has been to ensure that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are the main benefactors with respect to our natural resources,
Benefactor.
A benefactor is someone who delivers a benefit to someone else.
She is a bit like Dubya sometimes.
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Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s year-end talking points for 2012 were pretty grim.
As she told CBC’s David Cochrane, the provincial government is facing an enormous deficit. The deficit is the result not of government spending but of the up-and-down nature of the commodities on which government revenues depend.
The result is that government will have to raise taxes or cut jobs or some combination of both in order to cope with the deficit next year.
This should sound awfully familiar to people.
The Premier will announce something this evening at 6 PM.
If she announces that cabinet has already sanctioned the project, no one will be surprised.
If she announces that the project is already sanctioned, then the odds rocket up that this post from a couple of weeks ago will become the big story of the coming weeks and months.
Think of the post as a bit premature, that’s all.
Tom Marshall already confirmed he’s leaving.
And they are talking cuts and layoffs again.
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Mr. Speaker, when the PUB produced its report it concurred with Nalcor – and it is in the executive summary right in the front so you might want to read it. It concurred with Nalcor and MHI that based on Decision Gate 2 numbers that we did need the power and indeed it was the least-cost alternative. [Muskrat Falls]Premier Kathy Dunderdale on the PUB and its review of Muskrat Falls [December 11, 2012]
We did try to bring this project under the scrutiny of the PUB. Over nine months and over $2 million later, they would not give us a recommendation.Incidentally, what the Premier said on December 11 is correct.