Sod off, Norm Doyle #nlpoli

Ex-Harper fart catcher
Norm Doyle

Veteran Connie hack Norm Doyle has finally aged off the public tit, on which he spent too much of his adult life.

Attention spans are so short in local politics these days that most people don't remember his stint as a fart catcher for Stephen Harper let alone his long time in provincial politics.

So let's refresh memories with a couple of examples.

Anyone who wants to get a more fullsome account of Norm's shallow and self-serving political career can use the search function in the upper left corner of these e-scribbles and enter "Norm Doyle".  

Lazy readers can click that link on Norm's name.

In his memoir published a few years ago,  Doyle whined about that time in 1989 when he and his crowd were turfed by voters into a batch of shitty offices in the Confederation Building.  

Your humble e-scribbler told the story more honestly than Norm ever would:

Doyle and his mates wound up in the western wing of the fifth floor in a part of the building they had not renovated since it was built in the 1950s. Sometimes water poured in when it rained. That’s the spot the Conservatives gave the Liberal opposition when, in their arrogance, the Conservatives figured that these offices were only ever going to occupied the Liberals or the New Democrats.  Doyle had never worked in the Opposition office  - despite the implication of one sentence in his book - and most of his colleagues couldn’t remember the time before 1972 when the Tories had won power from Smallwood and the Liberals.

By contrast, Doyle and his colleagues made sure their offices were well-appointed. They spared no public expense to fit themselves out in fine style.  Bear in mind that Doyle was part of a provincial government that was in very tough financial shape.  Among the Tories, only the Speaker worked in a place decorated in a style best described as a cross between a Turkish whorehouse and a set from Good Fells or Married to the Mob. The rest were lavish as lavish could be in a 1980s way.  Doyle doesn’t get into any of that but clearly, from the way Doyle describes the election episode, he still finds the whole thing painful a quarter of a century later.

Politics and Numbers #nlpoli

Regular readers of these scribblers will recall that we’ve discussed some problems that people have with math. 

More specifically we’ve talked about numeracy problems, which is a little bit different.  That’s not just the arithmetic functions – add, subtract, multiply, divide – but also with things like logic and reasoning.  According to some sources, as many as two out of every three people in Newfoundland and Labrador lack the basic ability with math and logic to function in a modern society.

That gets to be a pretty scary idea when you realise the importance of numbers, counting, math proportions and all the other number-related ideas that we run into during the course of a day. 
Numbers play a big part in politics just like they do in everyday society.

One of your e-scribblers favourites was the notion of the provincial government being too poor to spend money on this that or the other. It’s a line the current crowd ruling the place used to toss out when ordinary people wanted something, even though the Conservatives always managed to come up with billions of public dollars for their own projects.

We are talking before 2008, mind you. Back then, Danny Williams got a lot of political mileage by making all sorts of wild and in some instances completely false claims about the state of the province’s finances.  When it came to federal transfer payments,  the level of false information was truly astounding.

Somewhere in the midst of all that your humble e-scribbler called one of the radio talk shows and threw some numbers on the table.  The regular callers, some of them fairly obvious government plants were spouting off all sorts of thoughts and ideas.  Around the same time, the guy who is currently the Bloc NDP member of parliament for St. John’s South-Mount Pearl ran a newspaper.  His “balance sheet” on Confederation contained a raft of information carefully selected to “prove” his predetermined conclusion.

Anyway, what your e-scribbler tossed out were then- current figures on what each government spent each year in total on public services.  The figures also came for different sectors.  They were delivered on a per capita basis.  That means the numbers showed how much the government spent for each person within the province.