The United Newfoundland and Labrador Party #nlpoli

In preparation for the coming general election battle, the provincial Conservatives are digging in their headquarters within sight of the head waters of Shit Creek.

They are frustrated, as David Cochrane reports.  They cannot lay a glove on Dwight Ball and the Liberals. As a result, “[w]e are going to be very aggressive,”  a big Tory told Cochrane.

Like the Conservatives have been push-overs and pansies until now.  Since 2001,  the provincial Conservatives have been the most harshly partisan bunch of politicians Newfoundland and Labrador has seen since Confederation.  Go back to the Bill 29 racket or the Muskrat Falls fight. 

Heck, go back to the way they treated Tom Osborne.  Ostracised within caucus and then when he left them,  brutally abused by Steve Kent, Joan Burke,  Kathy Dunderdale and the rest of the Conservative goon squad.

The Conservative NDP Merger we need #nlpoli

The province’s largest public sector union met last week in St. John’s for its annual convention.  They started out their first day with a speech from recently-elected boss Jerry Earle. The militant guy promised the union would militantly oppose any plan to turn public sector services over to the private sector.

The province’s NDP leader – Earle McCurdy - spoke to delegates on Thursday.  McCurdy said for umpteen thousandth time this year, that he and his friends in the union party would also steadfastly resist any effort to privatize public services. 

Friday was the day the union let the other two provincial party leaders say a few words.  What happened next was amazing..

Polls, St. John’s East, and the coming provincial election #nlpoli

SRBP told you on Tuesday morning that the federal election did not bode well for the New Democrats and Conservatives in the province.

The Liberals are just better organized than the other parties.  They can identify their voters,  keep in touch with them, and get them to the polls far better than the New Democrats or the Conservatives.  That’s how you win elections.  And when you are that much better at it than all the others, the odds go up exponentially that you will get more and more seats than people might expect. 

There’s way more to it than just the idea that the Liberals have a computer program that does today what we used to do on index cards.  Campaigns converted to Excel and other spreadsheet programs back when personal computers first appeared.

Organization is also about how the parties collect information and what they do with it. The Liberals are light years ahead of the competition, as Monday’s results showed.

Stagnation and Decay #nlpoli

The House of Assembly finished its spring session on Thursday after what appears to be one of the shortest sessions in the past 30 years.

The government presented only seven bills for debate, only a quarter of the normal load for the major sitting for the House.  That seems to be a record as well, and not of the sort any government would wish to hold.

For good measure,  the people of Newfoundland and Labrador could watch some of the most abysmal behaviour in recent memory, including a political lynching aided by a partisan and incompetent Speaker of the House.

What they are really watching, though, was nothing as trivial as a finance minister Jerome Kennedy’s second session of embarrassing  verbal attacks on other members.  People are watching a governing party that is in the advanced stages of stagnation and decay.

A fundamental lack of competence #nlpoli

One crowd can’t even successfully rig a process they set out to rig from the start.   So now the Premier wants to have a debate she earlier rejected as unnecessary in a legislature she once called dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, another crowd of politicians decides to frig off to Ottawa to support one individual’s personal campaign to be the next Labrador member of parliament when they should have been home working on a much bigger issue for the whole province.

Both speak to a fundamental lack of competence.

- srbp -

Dip-Flop Fly #nlpoli

Twitter flame wars between cabinet ministers and Dale Kirby over Muskrat Falls.

Surely Darin, Jerome and Clyde have better things to do with their days.

Then again, maybe not.

But at the heart of the whole flare up was Lorraine Michael’s theatrical delivery of a letter to the public utilities board on Tuesday explaining she would not be making a presentation on Muskrat Falls.

Like they really gave a flying frig in the first place.

Right after she handed the envelope to someone from the utilities regulator, Michael took some questions from reporters.

Michael is in a bit of a political jam, you see.  Tuesday’s little bit of a show was a way to try get out of it.  Michael campaigned during the last federal election alongside Jack Layton.  The provincial and federal NDP supported a loan guarantee for Muskrat Falls.  Good for Newfoundland and Labrador (votes), as it seemed at the time, and definitely good for some votes in Nova Scotia.

That was then.

This is now.

In the meantime, public sentiment in the province has shifted against the project.  Lots of people - lots of significant people – have turned up lots of significant problems with the deal. While Michael went along with the whole thing back in 2011 when she was the lone Dipper in the provincial legislature, she now has a caucus to contend with.  Some of them don’t like Muskrat Falls.

Hence the softening of official Dipper support for the project.

But Michael still can’t get away from the unions.  They love the project.  Lots of public dollars to employ lots of unionised members and potential union members. 

Want to know how strongly the union support the project?  Check any comment by federation of labour boss Lana Payne. And when the unions want something, their political wing – Lorraine’s bunch – will have a hard time opposing them.  All of this allows for big internal divisions in the NDP caucus and that’s without getting into the egos and the ambition.

Part of what you saw in the Twitter fight on Tuesday was the Tories pounding on a wedge issue: the NDP position on da Falls.  And they were hammering the wannabe leader, Dale Kirby.  He gets on Tory nerves, big-time, for a whole raft of reasons.  There were lots of school-boy taunts about getting him in the House where people would see the Dippers for what they are.  Yada, yada yada, blah, blah, blah.

All that bravado doesn’t get away from the fact that the only caucus more fractured than the Dipper one is the Tory crew.  They’ve got splits over the fishery and the budget and Muskrat Falls.

What’s more, Kathy Dunderdale has no control over her cabinet, let alone her caucus. One day after she says that people have to put their egos aside and stop playing the blame game so everyone can sort out the fishery, former fisheries minister Clyde Jackman is out there playing the blame game on province-wide radio. 

So amid all the bluster and fury on Tuesday between the Tories and the Dippers lots of things were not as they seem.

Go read Lorraine’s letter, for example.

In effect, it is a submission to the commission review of the Muskrat Falls project.  You see, if Lorraine really didn’t want to participate in the whole exercise she just wouldn’t have shown up in the first place.

Instead she says that a presentation wouldn’t allow her to outline the NDP concerns. Then she outlines them without having to face any questions from the panel or Nalcor. 

Oddly enough, the Liberal Party’s natural resources critic managed to sit in front of the commission and lay out substantive concerns.

In the letter, Michael states the NDP criteria for a successful project;  economically viable, environmentally sustainable and beneficial to the province. Like anyone would propose an economically foolish and environmentally destructive project that would screw taxpayers to the wall.

And in the letter itself, she doesn’t say that the provincial NDP think the whole idea of the project is nutso.  Lorraine basically says that there isn’t enough information and that there should be time for a more detailed review.

“We are not yet convinced…”

She doesn’t say “not convinced”.

Lorraine says not yet convinced.

The Big Tories who have come out against the project are saying they want a proper process.  That’s so they can’t be accused of betraying the party.  No one can mistake their meaning though, even if the actual words are soft. They know Muskrat Falls is ludicrous.

The NDP use coded language, too.  But notice the difference between the Tory code and the Dipper code.  With the NDP, you really can’t see an unequivocal rejection of the project.  Lorraine left a hedge in her letter, the letter that is a submission to the review while claiming it isn’t a submission.

The one thing you can’t mistake though is the political turmoil in the province at the moment.  If any of it erupts into the open, this could be an amazing year in local politics.

- srbp -

No threat #nlpoli

In a meeting of the committee that manages the business affairs for the House of Assembly, the Tories approved an additional $150,000 for the Liberals.  The New Democrats got nothing, even though they have a significantly larger caucus.

Check this CBC report for a good synopsis.

The Tories used a 2008 report to justify the extra Liberal cash.  Back then, they denied the Liberals the cash recommended by an independent review and, instead, rewarded the New Democrats.

You can take all the political chatter about this little episode but don’t spend too much time on it.  Instead focus on what this little play by the Tories says about their opinion of which party poses the bigger political threat to the Tories.

Hint:  it ain’t the Liberals.

And frankly, that’s a pretty sensible call at this point.

Since last October, the provincial Liberals haven’t done anything to suggest they are sharper than they used to be, more focused or anything else positive. In fact, if anything, the Liberals have actually slid backwards. A series of internal problems garnered the caucus some embarrassing headlines.  Their media work – such as it is – remains clunky and amateurish.  There’s no sign they are doing anything to develop an A Game, let alone bring it. More money isn’t likely to make any difference to them.

On the other hand, more money would have let the New Democrats hire staff to reinforce the ones they’ve got.  The Dippers have been hitting the Tories hard lately;  well, a lot harder than the Liberals. If they’ve been able to do damage with few resources you don’t need much of an imagination to figure out what they could do with more.

So let’s see what happens over the next few months.

The Tories have never been more vulnerable:

• Sound financial management, accountability and transparency? That’s been pretty much demolished by the latest Auditor General’s report. 
• The Kiewit story points back to some serious problems with the 2008 Hebron deal.
• We are pushing up on the latest deadline for Nalcor to cut a deal with Emera on Muskrat Falls.
• Public opposition to the Muskrat Falls proposal is growing.
• There’s trouble at the mill in Corner Brook.
• The government is likely to run real deficits over the next few years:  money will be tighter.

Let’s see which of the opposition parties – if either – can actually score any points against the Tories.

The Tories have already shown us who they think is a bigger political threat.

How good is their assessment?

- srbp -

Believing things that aren’t true

Cynthia Downey, ace provincial Conservative cheerleader, declares her unflinching support for the plan to double electricity rates in the province in a recent letter to the Telegram:

I, for one, am glad to have a government with a good plan for developing the hydroelectric power and making it profitable for us by selling it in the northeastern U.S.

Unfortunately for Cynth, that’s not true.

Nalcor vice president Derrick Sturge said recently that Muskrat falls power may never go to the United States.  Nalcor isn’t counting on the United States market.

There’s good reason, too.  Right now the Americans can pump out so much cheap electricity that they are selling it into New Brunswick.  And that’s pretty much the forecast for the near future, at least out to the time Muskrat Falls will start pumping.

It doesn’t get any better, at least for Cynthia Downey.

She recites reason after reason for backing the deal but every one of her reasons is as wrong as that one about selling power to the United States.

She even trots out the old chestnut about shutting down Holyrood.

You’d think that a person who’d already been sucked in by a load of malarkey once before would learn to spot it again.

- srbp -

Strings and all

Frank Moores was the second premier to hold office in Newfoundland and Labrador after Confederation.  He led the Progressive Conservative Party to victory in the 1972 provincial general election, defeating Joe Smallwood and ending Smallwood’s 23 year reign.

That was no mean feat and Moores didn’t do it single-handedly. He led a large group of people who organised themselves in a political party that was distinctly  different from Smallwood’s Liberals.  Until the late 1960s, the Liberal party had no district associations, for example.  Smallwood maintained a hand-picked fixer in every district who handled all the party business.  Smallwood himself picked candidates and until the 1969 convention, there’d been no leadership debate of any kind.

Moores won the Tory leadership at a convention held in May 1970.  A group of influential Conservatives, including Danny Williams’ mother and father spearheaded a drive to get Moores back from Ottawa where he sat as a member of parliament.

Now, in itself, that’s fascinating in light of the political outlooks of provincial Conservatives like Chick Cholock.  Ross Wiseman’s executive assistant wrote an e-mail to Brad Cabana, the Tory leadership hopeful back in late December.  Cholock wrote – you may recall – that “in an ideal world there will not be a leadership challenge.”  As Cholock saw it, a leadership battle “always hurt the party for years.  Any Party at all…”.

In the 1970 leadership convention, the Tories had a handful of candidates.  The list included Herb Kitchen, John Carter, Walter Carter and Hugh Shea.  Moores won handily and there was a minor controversy but for the most part, the party managed to sort out the difficulties and carry on.  Almost a decade later, the party held another leadership convention and managed to avoid any lasting controversy. The Tories stayed in power for another decade.

That hardly sounds like a series of unmitigated disasters, does it?

In the 40 years since Moores’ convention victory, the provincial Conservatives have certainly changed.  They’ve become – in essence – a fairly typical local political party for Newfoundland and Labrador.  Now, as before Confederation, the parties aren’t programmatic. They don’t have ideologies or set agendas.

And, at least as far as the province’s Conservatives have shown over the past few weeks, they certainly aren’t driven by grass-roots members.  They are most certainly not, as Danny Williams described them last year, a Reform-based Conservative party.  The Reformers believed very firmly that political parties ought to be directed by their members.  Policy used to get set at regular conventions.  District organizations picked candidates.  The party constitution laid down clear and unmistakeable rules and people paid attention to the rules.

No one could mistake the difference between that approach to politics compared to the provincial Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Sure the party has a constitution and bunch of people have titles.  But even the rules about something as crucial as membership aren’t clearly spelled out in the party’s fundamental document. And when it comes to deciding what those rules mean, only the insiders get to decide who the insiders can be.

In that sense, you could say that the local Tories aren’t democratic.  Now before anyone goes off the handle, understand that is not the description offered up by your humble e-scribbler.  A Tory supporter posted a comment on Twitter last week that said exactly that:  “a political party is not a democratic institution.”  Open Line host Randy Simms said exactly the same thing last week as well.

While you can disagree about what democracy means exactly, it is rather striking that two politically aware and presumably politically astute people in the province could state that political parties are not democratic organizations.  They weren’t troubled by the idea, apparently.  They didn’t find it odd.  In fact, it would seem that they found it perfectly natural for a political party to be run by an inner cabal accountable only to themselves.

And, as it seems comments online, provincial Conservative supporters seem to think every political party operates this way.  They don’t, but that is another matter.

What’s really striking is the way Frank Moores viewed political parties 40 years ago. You can find this quote in Janice Wells’ recent biography of the former premier:

Political parties are what people make them.  We’ve got to get people involved who don’t even recognise the need that they be involved in their own welfare, their own future, who perhaps after twenty-one [sic] years don’t even realize they have that right, and we have to get our best people involved, our best academics, artists, businessmen, educators.  I want these people to become totally involved in the work that faces us, and to know that they won’t be manipulated like puppets but will have major roles to play in reviving the province.

Political parties are indeed what people make of them.  In some bizarre twist, the people who make up the provincial Conservative Party in the early years of the 21st century have managed to turn Frank Moores’ party into something he most likely wouldn’t recognize.

- srbp -

The Post-Danny World

Political junkies  - especially every Tory in the province - will no doubt be glued to their sets tuned to NTV and their exclusive interview with Premier Danny Williams from his home in Florida. That’s where he is recovering from surgery which – as we now know – took twice or three times as long as originally anticipated.

As NTV news director Fred Hutton teased it up, they’ll be asking a good many questions including one about the Premier’s political future.

Odds are good those same political junkies will be pondering a few more questions in the months ahead, regardless of what the Premier tells Fred.

Questions like:

• Who among the current provincial Conservatives has been organizing already to replace The Leader when he finally decides to head off to Sarasota permanently?
• Who among them has the biggest war chest?
• Which provincial Tories won’t be running for re-election whenever the writ drops next for a general election?

These questions and others related to them may well be the most pertinent political questions to ask in Newfoundland and Labrador for the rest of this year.

Well that and the perennial favourite:  “whatever happened to John Hickey’s lawsuit against Roger Grimes, anyway?”

-srbp-

Pattern Behaviour 2: Spot the Pitcher Plants

Provincial Conservatives love to astroturf. In fact they've had this latest astroturf run planned for some time.

They love to call radio programs and make comments in support of their leader, usually following talking points that are astonishingly similar.  It's supposed to appear like a giant groundswell of support for their leader's cause du jour;  some of it - like the insistence they aren't coached - gets kinda funny.

Within the past 24 to 48 hours, the number of Pitcher Plants has jumped dramatically. The ABC Astroturf is in full bloom.

You can tell them a mile away:

1. They make repeated reference to "Premier Williams", pledge their support for him and praise him in the stereotypical pitcher plant fashion.  Most people don't have a need to do that;  Provincial Conservatives evidently do.
2. They make repeated references to the need to "stand up for your province".  A recurring theme among Provincial Conservatives is that the province consists of one mass whose interests are identical and who must act in a corporate fashion under the leadership of a single individual in order to achieve victory over external forces.  That's the foundation of Provincial Conservative politics since at least 2003.
3. They've been making repeated attacks on Fabian Manning.  Again, that hasn't been a common feature of the call-in shows to date.  Tonight it's all Fabe, all the time.  Despite the efforts to claim otherwise - nothing could be further from the truth - there's been a great deal of Family Feud energy directed to defeating Manning.
• Dead give-away:  they all make reference to the same episode, namely Manning sitting next to Harper in the House.  They describe this episode suing similar terms and typically misrepresent what happened in the same way their Leader did originally. People who aren't Provincial Conservatives don't need elaborate rationales to vote against Conservatives.
• Second dead give-away:  they praise any politician who has sided with their beloved "Premier Williams", usually referring to the individual as having acted in the best interests of his or her constituents.  To provincial Conservatives, their leader's decisions and the interest of the entire province are synonymous. (See Indicator 2 above)
4. They take great care to distinguish between Conservatives and the Provincial Conservatives, which they insist on calling Progressive.  Only Provincial Conservatives need to make that distinction for some reason.  Liberals and New Democrats don't care.
5. They turn up online making comments from behind a pseudonym.  In classic Provincial Conservative fashion, everything is about their leader. Note that the two comments here are from individuals who have a well-established pattern of behaviour presenting exactly the same kinds of comments offered here.  They didn't comment on the original post at all, suggesting that they weren't yet mobilized to start astroturfing.

-srbp-

The politics of strange bedfellows

Bob Ridgley is the Provincial Conservative member of the House of Assembly for St. John's North and part of a family clan that dominates a significant chunk of Conservative vote in the metro St. John's area.

Since his provincial district sits almost entirely within the federal riding of St. John's East where more and more incumbent MHAs (all Provincial Conservatives by the way) seem to be turning out in support of the New Democrat's Jack Harris, it's a fair bet that Bob will be voting Orange in October.

That's hardly surprising given that the Liberal  - Walter Noel - is a former provincial cabinet minister and the Conservative candidate is a guy who has been a perpetual thorn in the side of Premier Danny Williams.  Former journalist Craig Westcott did a game job today of defending Stephen Harper following a speech by the Premier at the Board of Trade,  but it's got to be getting harder and harder for Westcott to keep up a defense of the clearly indefensible.  He said the words but they lacked conviction. It's too bad to see a decent guy like Westcott - the contrarian's contrarian - do this kind of damage to himself.

But that's digression.

CBC News this evening included an interview with some local politicians on the federal campaign.  Energy minister Kathy Dunderdale  - a provincial Conservative - proudly announced she'd be working for the Dipper's Harris.  Not surprising given that she punted Noel to the curb in 2003.

But what of the others, like Ridgley?

While he didn't say so in a Telegram interview on Tuesday, Ridgley made clear a couple of other things. 

First of all, it's pretty obvious he is a Conservative - Provincial and usually federal - right down to being a voter in the merger election that saw Stephen Harper elected. 

Yep.  It is a Family Feud at heart and no one should be naive enough to believe that in a few years time this whole thing won't have snapped back to the usual friendships, relationships and voting patterns.

But here's an even more interesting  turn of phrase in Ridgley's e-mail response to the Telegram reporter:

When Stephen Harper was running to be the leader of the 'new' Conservative Party, I supported Belinda Stronach;  I thought she was as shallow as a saucer but I believed that she was the only one who had a chance of stopping Harper...

Ridgley keeps going, saying next that he was persuaded Harper was alright a little later on.  Ridgley's conversion to the Harper cause survived two federal elections.  Ridgley evidently kept pounding doors or whatever a key local Tory organizer does to get Stephen Harper elected despite the concerns raised about Harper, the evident problems Ridgley had at the time Harper became leader and well, just about anything else that might have given him pause.

Okay?

Well, not really.

You have a guy here who was prepared to get into political bed with someone he believed wasn't qualified for the job  - lacking in intellect is the polite version of what he said - because he believed that candidate was the only way to stop someone else from winning about whom he claims he had serious misgivings at the time.

How serious?  Well serious enough to vote for someone who to him seemed too shallow to be a national party leader.

What's the word for that sort of logic? 

Facile.

Well, yeah. 

But there's a better one.

Shallow? 

Yeah, shallow.

When that first shallow bit of logic didn't work out, Ridgley changed his mind and got into bed with Stephen Harper.

If that's not enough to make you a little uneasy, there's maybe the whole reference to Stronach as being "shallow as a saucer". 

That's gratuitous. 

It's a cheap shot.

It's a pretty low personal attack, along the lines of calling someone a quisling or a traitor or showing a puffin crapping on the leader of a rival party.

If nothing else, it was totally unnecessary in the context of the e-mail on any level and that too says as much about Ridgley's judgment as the other stuff.

It will be interesting to see how Nancy Riche, among others, reacts to having Ridgley knocking doors on behalf of Jack Harris. Does Bob share Jack's views on choice and equal marriage for example?  There's a set of questions to pose to the Blue Crew who are turning Orange suddenly.

Ridgley's backing the ABC thingy  for a very specific reason and when the reason goes away he and the rest of his "progressive" Conservatives will head back home, just as he was prepared to switch from Belinda to Steve when it suited.

Politics can make for some truly strange bedfellows.

-srbp-

Quietly Conservative

Over at the Telly, the weekend and holidays crew is writing headlines designed to arouse the irk of the nationalist fringe.

Either that or they didn't notice it's not just the apparent mainlander quoted by Canadian Press as dismissing the Anything But What It Seems campaign.

At least one of the people from Newfoundland and Labrador isn't impressed by the Premier's bout of high dudgeon and he's not a political science professor somewhat removed from reality, err, the front lines of political organizing.

Liam O'Brien points out the bleeding obvious, the so-bleeding-obvious that Memorial University political science professor Steve Tomblin missed it entirely. Sayeth Liam:

“It’s the strangest thing. It takes me back to my Catholic days when you go to confession. We’re getting these people walking up and whispering to us, ‘I’m a provincial Progressive Conservative, but I’m also a federal Conservative,”’ he said.

“They (Tory voters) don’t need to scream it out loud, they just need to mark their X on the ballot.”

That's pretty much what they did in 2004, the last time the provincial Conservative leader had a bit of a disagreement with his federal brother.

Comparing the 2004 and 2006 vote counts shows some slight suppression of turnout in the St. John's area ridings and a slight drop in federal Connie vote. But once the provincial Connies were given dispensation to work for the federal crowd, the numbers moved back up.

Overall though, the population continued its usual pattern of voting anything but Conservative. That's what they've done in almost every election since 1949. And when they didn't do it, as in the late 1960s, the vote was driven almost entirely by their dissatisfaction with the provincial Premier of the day.

Like say 1997, when the locals were so rotted with the provincial government and Brian Tobin (Lloyd Matthews, father of Danny's Liz as health minister) over health care, that they bucked the trend and turned out a bunch of Connies even in formerly safe Liberal seats.

Poof.

Times change.

The irk subsides.

Every sign that voters are going back to their usual voting patterns not just here but across Atlantic Canada.
Up pops young Mr. Tobin to proclaim that he is leaving the premier's job behind and heading back to Ottawa - notwithstanding his promise of just a few months earlier he'd finish the full second term - to lead a joyous crusade for something or other and set it as his personal mission to restore Liberal seats in Atlantic Canada.

Restore Liberal seats.

When the polls showed voting patterns returning to the historic norms and seats which had gone Connie or Dipper in 1997 would be returning to the Gritty crew.

And some less than observant observers vowed it would be possible what given that young Mr. Tobin was wildly popular, a brilliant political strategist and able to walk on water, heal the sick and turn water into Jockey Club at the drop of a hat.

Miraculous lad, that young Brian, said all the sayers of sooth.

Had a bit of trouble with the fishes, though, but other than that a wonderful popular fellow who at no point had an ulterior political motive like say becoming prime minister. Pay no attention to that guy behind the curtain holding fund-raisers.

He's just going back to Ottawa on a mission for the people and he will produce a voting miracle.

But you see the pattern, right?

Predict something that usually happens and the rubes will think you are a genius.

It's the stuff of a late-night infomercial by The Amazing Ruth and her Psychic Bunions.

It does point out the weakness in all the drivel about Danny being pissed because Steve fooled him and so now Danny is going to make Steve pay by campaigning against him.

That weakness being the lack of tangible evidence the Provincial Conservative will have any sway with voters anywhere at all, including locally when it comes to federal politics.

'Cause, as Liam points out, in the secret ballot box where even the dogsbodies sniffing out the unfaithful for their master cannot go, there's no way of knowing what a given person does in the secrecy of the ballot box.
That little reality would be galling if that's what the dogsbodies' master really had as his political goal in the Anything But Reality campaign.

Not everything is as it appears, even on a Blackberry screen.

-srbp-

 

Eats, shoots and leaves update: 

There are typos. 

Untied instead of united?  That's a typographical error in which letters are tapped out of sequence.

Then there are spelling problems.  Typing sediment when you meant sentiment.  Or tudor when you meant tutor.

No matter how you try and explain those, there is no way that those misuses of words are a function of fingers hitting the wrong keys.

Then, there are problems with punctuation.

Turns out that the headline on the story linked above is the original Canadian Press headline.

Almost.

The CP version had a colon between the word "Ontario" and the word "commentator".  The colon suggests that the words before it are a paraphrase of a comment made by the commentator.

In this instance, there's a slight difference to the two headlines given the punctuation variation.

The Telly headline suggests that the commentator from Ontario isn't impressed.  That's true, if you read the story, but the CP version gives the sense of the comments in the story story, namely that voters in Ontario won't be impressed.

All of this may only bother a handful, but when you are trying to communicate an idea clearly, everything from spelling to punctuation to verb tense to getting the words in the right order can affect what idea the reader sees.

For those who are troubled by punctuation, for those who do not know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon, there is help:

Your humble e-scribbler has looked for this book in a local bookshop for some time now.  The heavens aligned recently and delivered it at a second-hand bookstore in Mount Pearl, in pristine condition and for only a handful of bucks.

Lynne Truss gives a master class in punctuation using simple sentences and plenty of humour.

What more could you ask for?