The Spring Election - when and why #nlpoli

There's likely going to be an election before Victoria Day.

If - by some miracle - the Liberals manage to win the Topsail-Paradise by-election next week you could be at the polls before the beer turns green for a day.

If you haven't heard that,  don't say now that you haven't been warned.

Tory angst might be well founded

Conservatives across Newfoundland and Labrador seem to be in a bit of a tizzy. Danny Williams’ sudden departure has the caucus so spooked they are trying to engineer a backroom deal to avoid a leadership contest.

On some level you have to wonder why they might be so uptight.  After all, to casual observers they would appear to be guaranteed an easy victory in October’s general election with or without the Old Man.

But then you see things like an online poll at The Western Star:  “If you were a Danny Williams supporter, are you less likely to vote PC now?”

So far, 46% of respondents are saying yes, they are less likely to vote Tory. 15% say they are more likely to vote PC and the remainder  - 39% – answered “no”.

Even in the government’s own polls, Danny always ran way ahead of the party.  In the most recent government poll, though, support for the party dropped about 10 percentage points compared to a poll done three months earlier. That wasn’t good even when people thought Danny would still be around for the fall election.

Now that he’s gone, things will likely turn out very differently.  People who barely won their seats at the peak of supposed Danny-mania in 2007 might not have such an easy time of it in 2011.  They might need a boost, like say from a cabinet appointment, to try and counteract the loss of Danny Williams’ entire coat.

Stop and think about it for a second, though, and the long term trend of Danny running in front of his party’s support and the Western Star online poll are pointing in the same direction.  It would make sense that people who had voted Conservative in the recent past would now be thinking about shifting their vote.  They were Danny Tories, as it were, not committed Tories.

All that would lead explain why Conservatives in the province are a wee bit out of sorts these days. 

And if the number of soft Tory votes is actually close to the 46% the Star found, then politics over the next eight or 10 months is going to be way more interesting than anyone suspects right now.

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Priorities

With a chance to pose a question to the Prime Minister about troubles in search and rescue, CBC opted to ask Stephen Harper about his relationship with Danny Williams instead.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the acing Opposition leader about why his office had hired an experienced journalist  - known not to swallow the Premier’s crap as if it were candy -  to serve as communications director for the Opposition Office, a CBC radio host wanted to know how that might affect the Opposition’s relationship with Danny Williams.   

Nice to know the Mother Corp has its news priorities in order.

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Dawe bails

Peter Dawe is out of the race in Topsail district.

Regular readers may recall that the surprise in this corner was that Dawe was running in the first place given that he’d apparently already plighted his troth elsewhere.

No word yet on who might carry the Liberal banner in Dawe’s stead.  The New Democrats still haven’t named a candidate but are expected to find one later on Monday. [Update:  The NDP is running Brian Nolan.]

Meanwhile, the campaign is on and voting day is March 16.

Expect Paul Davis to win by a landslide.

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Rumpole and The Way through the Woods

Great howls came from the clerk’s room at Number 3 Iniquity Court this morning.

Over steaming mugs of Red Rose and a few cream crackers, the b’ys were having a laugh at the goings on over at the Provincial Court in Gander.

It is, for those who haven’t been following such things, the story of a court which has been one judge short since December 2008.  That’s when one of the two judges flew up to the Supreme Court leaving his benchmate, one Judge Short – Bruce, by name – to handle the unending tide of misbehaviour from Suburbia in the Woods and its environs. 

The matter should have been settled with a few appointments to the Christmas Honours List but something appears to have gone off the rails.

A lawyer in Gander, one Juan O’Quinn, turned up in a CBC News story on Friday bemoaning the problems with getting cases heard in a timely way under the circumstances.  The CBC story is still not correct on the whole picture since it links Don Singleton to the goings on.  That, as local Rumpole followers know, is a horse of an entirely other colour.

To return to the matter at bar, the clerks were quick to point out that O’Quinn is a former law partner of the health minister and the chairman of the Memorial University board of regents.  His talking publicly is not to be taken lightly especially when it is to complain about stuff not being done by cabinet appointment:

"If you have a situation where you want to get access to your children and your spouse is not permitting that and you need to get in front of a court, if the court is busy then obviously that's problematic," said defence lawyer Juan O'Quinn.

The problems in Gander are an old old story.  A year ago, the town council raised the issue with the local member of the House of Assembly for the district Gander is in.  As the Beacon put it in a story on the ongoing court problems:

The Town of Gander received a letter dated Feb. 17, 2009, from government services minister Kevin O'Brien, MHA for Gander. In it, the minister said the interview process for the provincial court judge position was underway and the it would be filled in the not too distant future.

O’Brien’s logic on the delay is  - characteristically - incomprehensible:

Minister O'Brien said he is not surprised the matter has taken this long, given the amount of interest in the position and the prominence of the provincial court.

In any event, the CBC story confirms what your humble e-scribbler had heard early, namely that Provincial Court Chief Judge Mark Pike sent a list of nominees along to the justice minister last November.  Normally that would be plenty of time to select as many qualified appointees as might be needed and to let the chosen few celebrate their good fortune over the holidays.

Not this year, as it turned out.

The clerks offered two versions of why not.

In the first version, the Chief Judge had been heard talking about appointing his team and setting things on the course he had chosen for the court.   The list went from Pike to justice minister Felix Collins who dutifully passed it along to He who Must be Obeyed.

He was not amused at all by the Chief Judge’s confusion over who actually makes the appointments and sent the list back to be re-worked.

In the second version, the list went up with only the list of people recommended by the judicial council to fill the vacancies.  There were no other names of those interviewed, as used to be the custom, broken down into categories of highly recommended, recommended (meaning they met the requirements set out in the Act but lacked some qualities the council sought) and not recommended.

There was not even a list of the type demanded for the mess that became l’affair Singleton, namely putting everyone into one of two categories:  Recommended -  which jumbled together in one undifferentiated mess the highly qualified and experienced as well as those who met barely met the minimums set down in law - and Not Recommended, which was all those who didn’t even meet the minimum requirements.

The November list apparently left off some names of individuals reputedly known to the political powers to have applied.

The list was sent back to be re-worked.

The two versions are not incompatible, it should be noted, and regardless of the precise reasons the end result is the same:  the bench in Gander as well as three other spots remain short of judges.

The cabinet is working its way through the woods and may eventually find someone to sit in Suburbia alongside Judge Short.

But in the meantime,  Bruce is on his own.

If Juan applied, he can cancel plans to lay up his shingle.

And there should be no question in any one’s mind about who appoints judges in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Well, at least that’s what the clerks said as they drained the last drop of Carnation from the tin and got back to their work, mugs full of a fresh brew.

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Rumpole and the Christmas Honours List

Word coming from the clerks’ room at Iniquity Court has it that on Tuesday next the province’s justice minister will announce recipients of the cabinet’s appointments to the provincial court bench.

There are four slots open, as Bond Papers readers already know. Some of them have been vacant for a year.

Who will make the Honours List?

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Phoenix

The provincial Liberal Party convention looks for all the world like the first big sign of a political party on the come-back trail.

A relatively large turnout – upwards of 200 people – and the election of a raft of new faces on the party executive suggest that interest in the party is rebounding after a few years of the doldrums.

Lawyer Judy Morrow replaced Danny Dumaresque as president. For all the concerns expressed around these parts about Dumaresque’s leadership intentions and the deferred leadership convention, the fact is the Danny and the old executive managed to keep the party alive and out of financial ruin. That was no small feat over the past four years. The old crew have passed on a pretty good foundation on which the new crew can start rebuilding.

One of the big tasks will be fund-raising and to handle that the party elected a new treasurer - John Hogan - to replace the septuagenarian senator Joan Cook.

One of the surest signs of revival is the speculation about Dean Macdonald as potential leader. Dean would normally not [inserted the word "not" which was left out of the first draft] be considered leadership material but the fact that some people are pushing him and the fact he’s been flitting about again over the past couple of weeks are a sign that the opportunists are sensing a potential vehicle for their own agendas.

Oddly enough, Macdonald told a Young Liberal breakfast meeting why he wouldn’t be a good leader. Differentiate yourselves from the other guys was his good but hardly novel advice. Coming from a guy who has already publicly stated his support for the other guys and for continued Dannyism, it’s pretty much impossible to differentiate yourself when all you offer is more of the same.

A new leader will turn up; he or she just won’t be one of the names that have cropped up already. In the meantime, politics in the province may get back to some sort of health if the Liberals can continue rebuilding and start offering a competitive challenge to the current set of policies from the Provincial Conservatives. Politics doesn’t work when one side dominates the agenda so completely.

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