What is reported is seldom what happened even though what happened is far more interesting than the stuff that falls into the orchestra pit.
Events in the House of Assembly are the result of decisions by members of all three parties. Any analysis that ignores the simple realities of the House or robs the individual members and their parties of their agency is misleading.
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The biggest
story from the House of Assembly’s latest session was Ches Crosbie’s call last
Thursday for his party to hold a vote on his leadership next spring.
There’s no
surprise in this. Political parties
usually dump leaders after a failed election and this time will be no exception
for both the federal and provincial Conservatives.
The
immediate impact of this, aside from what it means for the Conservatives, is
that the Liberals will now have an easy ride getting their budget through the
House no matter how bad it is. The
Conservatives won’t want to trigger an election in the midst of a leadership
change.
And there
*will* be a change. The Ball-led Liberals
are weak, and the polling numbers reflect that. Any reasonably competent opposition could unseat
them in a general election. After all,
Crosbie’s incompetent crowd came within a hair’s breadth of unseating the
Liberals and the Liberals have not gotten better six months later. So, expect a new Conservative
leadership hopeful to emerge after Christmas to lead a reinvigorated blue
bunch.
Meanwhile
on the Liberal side, Dwight Ball will also face a leadership review vote in the
middle of 2020 at the party’s postponed annual conference. The party executive skipped out the one for
2019 because it was an election year, but it must have a convention in June
2020 according to the party constitution. That’s not to say that party
president and Dwight Ball loyalist John Allen isn’t trying to find some way to
push the convention off to 2021.
Apparently, there is anxiety over the prospect that Ball wouldn’t
survive the mandatory leadership review vote that comes with the next party
convention.
But as big
as Crosbie’s Thursday announcement and Ball’s situation are for the future of
the province – there is that little provincial government financial mess
sitting out there unaddressed – that wasn’t what the news media and the local
political commentariat were yammering about last week.
No.
