The Slaughterhouse Five #nlpoli

Coupled with comparable high rates of staff changes in the senior ranks of the public service,  unprecedented staff turn-over in a critical part of Premier Dwight Ball's office raises questions that need to be addressed.

Premier Dwight Ball has entered the history books.

He has chewed up more communications directors than any Premier since 1972.

Word from the Confederation Building is that Erin Sulley, right, who left community television for the communications business only last October, is now the Premier’s Director of Communications.  It's the most senior political communications job in the provincial government

Sulley was host of Out of the Fog just before joining Ball's staff last fall in the media relations role. In what was a pretty clear conflict of interest, she also started writing a column for the Telegram at the same time.

Minority Report #nlpoli

One of the police officers responsible for the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s Twitter presence did an interview with CBC’s Anthony Germain last Friday.

The online CBC story that came out of the interview had an interesting set of comments in it. Constable Geoffrey Higdon said:

“People think Facebook or Twitter is different in how we traditionally police. It's actually very much the same. In a sense, it's no different than someone writing a threat to someone, or to an organization, on a wall in a bathroom or a public place. And we would investigate that and treat that seriously, until we determine that there is no threat."

Writing something on Twitter is like writing something on a bathroom wall.

Got that?

How did the Old Man work? (Part 1) #nlpoli

The Premier’s Office is a tough place to work.  The demands on everyone in the place are constant.  The implications of what you are dealing with in the office can affect one person or the whole province but more often than not the consequences will be dramatic.

As much as we’ve had some insight into the Conservative administration over the past couple of weeks and the past couple of posts, testimony at the Cameron Inquiry gave us some insight into how things worked during Danny Williams’ time in the Premier’s Office.

Williams appeared before the Inquiry on October 28 and both his chief of staff and communications director appeared as well.

Title Shuffling #nlpoli

The news via Twitter looked a lot bigger than it actually is.

David Cochrane tweeted on Saturday:

Sources: Premier Dunderdale shaking up staff on 8th floor (Premier's office). New deputy chief of staff Lynette Carroll (more)

Premier's new press secretary Debbie Marnell, new Director of Policy Denise Payne, new Assoc Dep Chief of Staff Derek Rideout (more)

Premier current press secretary Milly Brown moves to Special Assistant for Comms

Those moves continue a staff shakeup that started this summer with @LynnHammondNL taking the top Communications job on 8th floor.

Take a gawk at the provincial government telephone directory, though, and this looks a lot less impressive than you might think.  Here;s what these people were doing before and what they are doing now.

Name	Old Title	New Title
Lynette Carroll	Director of Policy	Deputy Chief of Staff
Derek Rideout	Director of Operations	Associate Deputy Chief of Staff
Debbie Marnell	Communications Specialist (TCR)	Press Secretary
Denise Payne	Special Assistant	Director of Policy
Milly Brown	Press Secretary	Special Assistant

Basically they’ve brought Debbie Marnell from a junior comms job in Tourism, Culture and Recreation to replace Milly Brown in the job of dealing with reporters day to day.

Brown goes off with a new title but there isn’t anything from the job description or her background that is a clue to what she’ll be up to.

Lynette Carroll, whose LinkedIn profile shows her as the Tory party executive director, moves from policy director in the Premier’s Office to deputy chief of staff.  No one filled that job in the Dunderdale Premier’s Office before.  They’ve created a new title for Derek Rideout but maybe not a new job to go with it. 

Rideout, incidentally had the title of Principal Assistant to the Premier whenever they last changed the PC Party website listing for the party executive board.

Maybe these changes will fix some problems on the 8th Floor but on the whole this looks a lot more like changing some titles and maybe changing some salaries rather than bringing in new staff with new skill sets.

This sort of stuff doesn’t change performance and poll results.

-srbp-