Nick Whalen killed a giant.
That’s the story of the 2015 federal election in Newfoundland and Labrador, bar none.
People told Whalen he was crazy to run against the popular NDP incumbent. No one gave him a chance. But Whalen wound up defeating the NDP heavyweight.
This is Craig Westcott’s editorial from The Pearl newspaper, reproduced with permission..
This is a tough column to write. Taking an editorial position in favour of one candidate over another when both have worked so hard in this election isn’t as easy as some partisans on either side might think.
My opinion is tempered by the experience of having run myself, back in 2008, when I didn’t stand a snot of a chance as the Conservative candidate in the federal election against the NDP’s Jack Harris, who had the full weight and force of Danny Williams’ popularity and provincial PC machine behind him.
As I said at the time, I ran not so much for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as against Danny Williams’ ABC campaign and his bid to isolate Newfoundland even farther from the political mainstream of this country.
In 2004, Danny Williams fought for three months against a federal government decision that had been settled – at least for the federal government – earlier in the year as part of the usual budget cycle.
Williams got the money the federal government had allocated but won the domestic war for public opinion.
In 2007, Williams and his provincial Conservatives launched a second political holy war against the federal government’s budget decisions. Williams waged a much longer war, lost it, but was widely credited at home with a victory.
There were other similarities
At the heart of the ongoing civil war between Danny Williams’ provincial Conservatives and Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives is the claim by Williams that Harper broke his 2006 election promise on Equalization.
Williams wrote to each of the federal party leaders and asked the leaders to state their party’s position on Equalization.
Unnamed Conservative “insiders” have been talking about the Ches Crosbie nomination fiasco as if it was a rejection of a new Tory Jesus or something.
The way they talk you’d think people are waiting breathlessly for the pictures on Jane Crosbie’s Twitter feed of young Ches taking his first steps across Virginia Lake, just as his father and grandfather did at his tender age without getting so much as a bunion moistened.
Some of these nameless Conservatives - to use the words from the CBC story – .”believe Ches Crosbie could have raised at least $100,000 by now for his run in Avalon. Many of those donors will now sit on their wallets rather than give cash to another candidate.”
Now that’s an interesting claim.
If you take John Crosbie’s version at face value, the Conservative Party rejected his son Ches as a candidate for the party in Avalon because of the intervention of David Wells.
Wells, the son of retired justice Robert Wells, is a senator from Newfoundland and Labrador. He is also an influential Conservative, the sort of fellow who normally goes about his business largely out of the public spotlight. .
Thanks to Crosbie, Wells is in the public eye. According to Crosbie, Wells didn’t “want Ches to be elected as an MP in the district of Avalon or any federal district because he would be too independent-minded and [Wells] wouldn't be in control as he has been now for a couple of years of most of the transactions between Newfoundland and the federal government.”
What the venerable Conservative was doing with that accusation was telling us less about the specific events that led to Ches’ rejection and more about a bigger story behind the scenes in Conservative politics.
The Harris Centre at Memorial University issued a report on the number of federal public servants working in Newfoundland and Labrador.
With a Liberal administration in Ottawa and with a provincial Conservative government that enjoyed shooting at foreign enemies, the whole argument about federal presence was a big deal.
“What does Paul Davis do now?”
That was the start of the conversation. A serious question after the latest in a string of by-election losses for the provincial Conservatives deserved an equally serious answer.
Well, said your humble e-scribbler, that assumes he and his fellow Conservatives actually want to do anything. Davis was the leadership candidate who promised to keep the party on its existing course in every respect. They firmly rejected not only making changes but even appearing to make changes.
Everything we can see – poll results, talk around town, you name it - says that voters want some changes in politics. The Conservatives refuse to change. And so it is that they have lost by-election after by-election after by-election.
It’s not rocket science.
Senator Fabian Manning says that the 2008 Anything but Conservative campaign is stilling hurting the province in dealing with the federal government.
“There's no doubt in my mind that the ABC campaign,” Manning told CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast,” [that] we pay a price for that, and people can shrug it off and say, 'That's just an excuse,' but I've been around this game too long now to not know that without a voice here at the table we are at a major disadvantage." [via CBC]
The disadvantage Manning referred to was the lack of a regional minister in the current cabinet who represents a riding in Newfoundland and Labrador. Some people might be tempted to dismiss Manning’s comments at sour grapes. After all, the ABC campaign cost Manning not only his seat in the House but also his chance for a seat in cabinet.
On that point, though, Manning is right. The regional minister is a key player in Ottawa and the province has undoubtedly suffered to one degree another by not having such an influential voice at the federal cabinet table.
Danny Williams appeared in Virginia Waters on Saturday to campaign for Danny Breen, the Conservative candidate in the by-election.
Breen’s campaign wasted no time in pushing out pictures of The Appearance, like the one above, another one showing him with some young fellows out posting Breen campaign signs in the district, or the one below showing him with some volunteers in Breen’s headquarters.
Sharp eyes will notice that the shot of the two Dannys is actually from something else entirely, not the campaign, but that’s neither here nor there.
What is important to notice is that this is the first time the Old Man has turned out publicly for His party since Hisself left the leadership in an unseemly haste in late 2010.
That’s what makes The Appearance stand out.
The Old Man has been content until now to do his work behind the scenes either directly or through agents. The fact Hisself is out pressing the flesh among the faithful sends a bunch of potent messages.
Cathy Bennett’s leadership launch event was organized as one would expect. Her speech was scripted and, hand gestures and all, well rehearsed.
From the start there was the flush of jargon that one expects these days from business people getting into politics. A “decision process’ had led her to this spot. The province must be “best in class”. Things must be “actioned”. We must “start a conversation.” Energy, passion and fire - especially passion – occurred in the speech with as much frequency as “strong voice” used to turn up with others.
She pledged to be “open and accountable” as well as honest and persuasive.”
Bennett didn’t offer much beyond stock phrases on anything, though, except on three points: increased immigration, full-day kindergarten, and Muskrat Falls.
In short, it’s bad enough when irresponsible rumour-mongers start the ball rolling.
The last thing politicians should do is feed the flames with fibs and subterfuge.Wonderful stuff, that, if only we could all safely rely on those inquiring minds to quickly ferret out the truth.
All the talk the past week or so about negotiations between the crowd in Confederation Building and the crowd in Ottawa brought out the conventional wisdom about premiers using fights with the feds for political purposes.
The coincidence of a talk on nationalism the week before linked the two ideas together neatly for some people. Kathy Dunderdale was having a row with Ottawa, possibly to boost her polling and maybe as a show of nationalist fervour that we all love.
Yeah, maybe that’s true.
And then again, maybe it just isn’t.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale said on Tuesday that the province will have problems now that it doesn’t have a federal cabinet minister from this province.
As CBC quoted her from a scrum outside the House of Assembly, Kathy said:
“It always makes it more difficult when you don't have somebody inside the tent,…”
This is not just a difficult position, it is a stupid position, but it is exactly the stupid policy that Kathy Dunderdale advocated.
Let’s make no bones about it.
Even at the deepest darkest moments after the death of Meech Lake, federal-provincial relations were never as bad as they are right now between the crowd in Ottawa and the crowd in Sin Jawns.
Danny Williams put all his political credibility into his anything but Conservative campaign. He pledged to campaign across Canada to defeat the federal Conservatives.
Williams lost.
Big time.
Sure he changed his goal at the end – as his failure became painfully obvious - and all the local media just repeated his reimagined version of the ABC campaign, but the truth is Williams screwed himself and the rest of us politically with his little ego-stunt.
Kathy Dunderdale decided the best way to fix that was to campaign for Harper in the next election. Okay, well she thought it best to say she would campaign. Whether she did or not depends on who you talk to.
And that worked out so well that the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador can’t get the Prime Minister of Canada to return her phone calls.
The latest idea Kathy had was to give the deputy minister of the intergovernmental affairs secretariat a new job. He will spend an unspecified amount of time “conducting a horizontal review of federal-provincial agreements to determine their efficiency and effectiveness.”
Does that mean Sean will lie down while he studies?
Seriously.
WTF is a “horizontal review”?
Now this is such an important initiative that the only word of it is in a news release announcing yet another shuffle around of members of the senior public service. Sean gets this new gig. Meanwhile, someone will fill in for him.
No word on what criteria Sean will use to determine efficiency and effectiveness or indeed what federal-provincial agreements they are including in the review. Most likely it is the deals that shift federal cash into provincial hands so the hands can hand it out to other provincial hands.
These agreements cover things like the federal gas tax transfer to municipalities, money for bridges, and big transfers for health, social assistance, and education.
We are talking big money, too. Last year, federal transfers to the provincial government totalled more than $1.0 billion.
No word on how long Sean will take.
And there’s no word about what the government will do with Sean’s report once he gets it done.
Perhaps Kathy will call Steve and…
Errr… maybe that might not be such a good idea.
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Okay, so the search and rescue sub-centre was never anything to go to war over anyway.
Still, that didn’t stop Kathy Dunderdale from pledging to do everything in her power to save all those really important jobs.
Remember?
Kathy had some kind of special new relationship with the Prime Minister since she and her caucus campaigned for the Tories in the last federal election. She made no apologies.
Here’s how your humble e-scribbler summarised her scrum last summer when this issue first came up:
Dunderdale told reporters that the “full force” of the provincial government will now be brought to bear to get the Prime Minister and his cabinet to change their minds. She said she has tasked two cabinet ministers and their senior staff to take “every opportunity” to pursue the issue with their federal counterparts over the next year. In addition, Dunderdale said she is also going to be doing the same thing, spending every available minute of the next year fighting to keep the 12 jobs in the province.
She tried a telephone call to her buddy, Steve, although apparently that kept the two staffs busy trying to figure out how to do it so that Steve and Kathy were on the phone together talking to each other.
She even wanted to spend provincial government dollars to keep the thing going.
The Premier plus two cabinet ministers, all their staff, doing everything they could at every opportunity and with the full force of the entire provincial government.
Well, all that they came up with with less than a little poof of hot air.
Kathy delivered nothing.
Zippo.
Bupkis.
Nada.
Sweet Fanny Adams.
And, of course, zilch.
Kathy failed.
You can tell Kathy failed because now she is telling everyone to frig off and go ask someone else.
Go ask the feds, she told Liberal leader Dwight Ball in the House of Assembly on Wednesday.
As you can see from that tweet CBC’s Jane Adey had later that same day, Kath was telling people to go after the federal members of parliament from Newfoundland and Labrador for answers. Wednesday wasn’t the end of it.
Dunderdale continued the foolishness Thursday by blaming Liberal members of parliament for her failure. It’s like John Hickey taking Roger Grimes to court for defamation over something Danny Williams said: obviously stupid. The federal Liberals wasted no time in lampooning Dunderdale anywhere they could in return. Her ministers are going to be taking it in the neck as well.
She’s going to get roasted for failing. She’s going to get hammered for her photo op with Stephen Harper.
And she brought it down on her own head.
Here are the political take-aways:
Kathy Dunderdale has no political sense. Smart politicians would never have been suckered into proclaiming the crusade in the first place. The issue wasn’t crucial to anything and the feds weren’t likely to reverse themselves given that no one could explain why the place was important to anyone for anything.
On the On Point panel last week, Liberal Siobhan Coady excused Dunderdale’s cock-ups. She’s new in office. Only a few months since the election.
That’s just crap and Siobhan should know it. Dunderdale’s been there since 2003. She’s been Premier since the end of 2010. Kathy’s got decades of municipal experience from before that. For all that experience, Kathy Dunderdale has no sense of political judgment.
Big Problem.
She doth bestride her imaginary world like a Colossus… So why did she jump in with both feet? Likely due to a completely unfounded but entirely unshakeable conviction that she can do anything, that she is all powerful and that she can do no wrong.
That’s the most likely explanation.
Dunderdale just got caught up in herself in her new job. Think of it like John Efford in his famous “There it is, Mr. Williams. There it is, Mr. Sullivan” news conference. It’s not an act: she displays all the same kind of prideful arrogance in other places. And you know what they say about pride.
Stick to your own lane. The root of this problem lies in Danny Williams’ stupid decision in 2008 to stake his entire political pile on the ABC campaign.
He lost.
Badly.
And then he had to limp through another couple of years as a lame duck.
Traditionally, federal politicians stay out of provincial politics and vice versa. If they did campaign, they did it quietly. No one took an official stand.
Courtesy might be one reason for it, but the real one lay in the simple and the pragmatic: no matter who wins you might have to work with them. Better to keep your mouth shut so you can have a productive working relationship.
Danny went one way and paid that price.
Kathy went the other way and will pay a different price.
Her mistake was in getting involved in the first place. Again it’s an amateurs mistake committed by someone - supposedly – with decades of political experience.
How does Kathy legitimately criticise the guys she campaigned for? What happens when they don’t come across with something you staked your reputation on?
Kathy is going to find out and the lesson might be painful. For the rest of us, we’ve already seen the full force of her political impotence.
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Guest post by Craig Westcott, from his editorial in this week’s Business Post.
If, as its president Judy Morrow has proposed, the Liberal Party puts off holding a leadership convention for two years, it will be making a serious, possibly ruinous mistake.
Like that one lonely turbot once described by then Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin as clinging to the Grand Banks by its fingernails, the Liberals are on the verge of extinction, despite its retention of Opposition status in the House of Assembly.
Tuesday’s CRA poll results confirm that.
For three consecutive quarters the NDP has marched upwards, standing solidly now in second place, its lack of Opposition status only temporary perhaps until the first by-election.
The bald truth is that nothing will get done to rebuild the Liberal Party without a real leader to push it. An interim leader won’t cut it, unless it’s someone of the ability of Bob Rae who is rebuilding the federal party while maintaining interim leader status. But Rae is an exception to the rule. There are no Bob Raes in the Liberal Party of Newfoundland, at least none that are obvious.
At the risk of telling tales out of school, I was shocked when I took the job as communications director for the Official Opposition last fall to learn there was no party apparatus backing the caucus. The fabled Big Red Machine no longer existed in this province. And even if it had existed, with a $700,000 to $800,000 deficit at the banks, there was no money to put gas in to run it.
There was no party membership list, there weren’t even district associations in most districts. Only for the work of long time MHA Roland Butler, who has perhaps the best organizational smarts in the party, there would have been no district associations in place to fight this past fall’s provincial election.
The sad truth was that little to no grassroots rebuilding had been done since the Liberals lost the disastrous campaign of 2007.
For most of the four years between elections, the leader retained interim status. For part of the time, until Morrow was elected party president, the executive headed by Danny Dumeresque was said by some in the party to be more determined to undermine interim leader Yvonne Jones than support her.
It was a mess. The view throughout the party was that as long as Danny Williams was leading the PCs, the Liberals didn’t have a chance of regaining government anyway, a mistaken view to those with knowledge of history. Joey eventually lost the confidence of the people and I believe Williams would have too, only much sooner than the 23 years it took Joey to crash. A more contemporary example, is Vladimir Putin, like Williams a wildly popular, dictatorial egomaniac while in office, who is now losing the confidence of the Russian people. Time brings down all dictators eventually, if death doesn’t get them first.
But I digress.
The problem with the Liberals is both a failure of leadership – on the party executive side as well as within the caucus - and also a matter of unfortunate circumstance.
During the year I spent with the Liberal caucus, it had only four members. The leader, Yvonne Jones, was off for much of that time, taking cancer treatment, though still involved with the running of the Opposition office. Another member, Butler, had his own health issue to face and was unable to participate in as much of the daily hurly burly as he wished. The other two members, Kelvin Parsons and Marshall Dean, had districts at the exact opposite ends of the island from St. John’s: One centred in Port aux Basques, 900 kilometres away, the other on the Great Northern Peninsula, situated even farther. When the House wasn’t sitting, which was often, they had to be in their districts tending to constituency matters. That meant they were unavailable to the television media in St. John’s (though full marks to Kelvin Parsons for beating it back and forth across the TransCanada every week to fill in for Jones and still take care of his constituents. If there was a prize for the hardest working man in politics last year, Parsons would have earned it).
Down the hall, the sole NDP member - the intelligent, earnest and hardworking Lorraine Michael - was in Confederation Building every day to take media calls. No sweat for her in that regard: Her seat was located in the city.
While a number of PC friends of mine have blamed the NDP surge in St. John’s on Danny Williams’ federal ABC campaign, which drove thousands of long time Tories into the Dippers’ camp, Michael deserves as much credit for also showing up for the media every day, especially when nobody from the Liberal office was available.
The situation for the current Liberal caucus is no better, despite the fact it has two more seats than last year. That’s because not one of the Liberal MHAs are from St. John’s or even the Avalon Peninsula. Two are from Labrador and the four others all have seats west of Deer Lake. The NDP, meanwhile, has five members, every one of them in St. John’s. Who do you think is going to win the war for media attention between now and the next general election in 2015?
And yet, the Liberal Party’s problems are not that hard to fix. It could probably write off all that debt by making a simple offer of 10 cents on the dollar to the banks. The debt is getting so old now it has probably been written off by the lenders on their own books already.
The party needs a full time organizer to rebuild and maintain the district associations, the basic battle units in any election.
It needs to take its head out of the water on the fishery and adopt a strategy that makes sense, resisting its outdated, overplayed, knee jerk habit of barking at the processors and shouting out support, but no real answers, for the plant workers and harvesters at all costs. Here’s a news flash gang: The fishery doesn’t decide elections anymore. There are so few people left working in the industry now, their votes can’t sway a campaign. And almost everyone in the industry is sick of being poor. They want change. Offer it to them. The PC government isn’t. That’s how you will win fishery votes.
And realize this: You can’t win the next election without winning St. John’s. So drop this rural/urban divide malarkey and devise some policies that will benefit the Avalon.
Finally, the Liberals have to regain some pride. The Grits have a good story to tell, if only they would tell it. Newfoundland’s current prosperity is due in large part to Liberal Premiers Clyde Wells and Roger Grimes, the guys who negotiated the three energy deals - as well as Voisey’s Bay – that are filling the government’s coffers. The crowd running the show now had nothing to do with any of it. And if Kathy Dunderdale implements this disastrous Muskrat Falls deal, the PC’s will destroy their chances of winning re-election next time around.
So there’s a lot to build for. But nothing will happen without a real leader to drive it. Waiting until 2013 will be too late. Find a leader now and have him or her ready to win a seat in the first by-election that comes up in 2012. Because if you lose that one to the NDP, the Liberal Party is finished.
If you stop writing yourselves off, maybe the rest of the province will too.
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Pretty well every single conventional media outlet ran a story in the wake of the federal election about how the results might affect Kathy Dunderdale and the provincial Conservatives.
CBC has an online story about a possible “hangover.” The Telly had a front pager on Wednesday on the same subject. NTV has a bit quoting Tom Marshall who denies there will be any backlash.
Not surprisingly, the provincial Conservatives all claim things are rosy and wonderful.
But here’s what this is really all about
Kathy Dunderdale and her crowd joined with the argument federally that the provincial Tories have used relentlessly on their own since 2003. It was all about getting behind the guys in power to get your goodies. Voters in the province rejected that flatly.
Dunderdale and her team did not produce a single victory other than the squeaker in Labrador. Everywhere else, their candidates got their asses handed to them. And that guy in Labrador is not one of Kathy’s crew. He’s got his own mind and his own agenda and it may not match up with Kathy’s. This vote result is a major rebuke for Kathy Dunderdale by voters.
Politically, Kathy herself backed off her position as it became clear voters didn’t buy her endorsement. She had members of her caucus who didn’t campaign with the rest or who did only the barest of bare minimums. Did Dunderdale herself make any campaign stops other than the one with Harper himself?
Dunderdale’s own statement on the results is exactly three sentences of bland platitudes. There is no reference to the loan guarantee and the Lower Churchill, at all. There is that line again about legitimate aspirations, whatever they are. Sounds more like a hollow phrase cooked up by the back-room brain trust rather than something that anyone - including Dunderdale - actually understands.
Maybe she has finally looked at her own polls that show Muskrat is an issue for a mere three percent of voters. The biggest issues for people are health care and the economy/job creation. If she wants to create a connection between Muskrat and jobs, clearly people don’t see it.
But as referenda go, Dunderdale just took a huge political gamble and lost.
Badly.
Whether or not the Prime Minister delivers the loan guarantee actually doesn’t matter. What matters is that Dunderdale launched a political campaign that, on the face of it, was the counter-part to ABC, and she couldn’t deliver.
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