The fun, games and bruises of politics

By Craig Westcott

This month’s provincial election result may have been the best possible outcome for Newfoundland.
The surprise PC Party win put pause on a multi-billion-dollar Churchill Falls deal that has not had proper scrutiny.
It also signals that Newfoundlanders may have finally joined other voters across Canada in moving quicker to remove parties from power when they are not working out.
The last decade under Liberal rule has been one of decline; waiting times and conditions in hospital emergency rooms have become unacceptable; drug use, addiction and crime is rampant; immigration is out of control causing a housing crisis and making it much harder for young Newfoundlanders to find work. The Liberals didn’t cause all these problems, but neither did they do a proper job of fixing them, and in the case of immigration and the housing shortage, they exacerbated things by striking side deals with the federal Trudeau Liberals to allow in more immigrants than in the rest of the country.
New Premier Tony Wakeham and his party have been given four years to see what they can do.
They are assuming power in front of the strongest Opposition in decades. Lawyer John Hogan is smart, ambitious, well-spoken, and now experienced in government. If his fellow Liberals don’t panic by replacing him, he bodes to be an effective and sharp Opposition Leader. Question Period will not be fun for the government. Four years in Opposition, if he survives it, will make Hogan a much more formidable political leader.
Hogan is bolstered by some of the best performers in his party, including Fred Hutton, Sarah Stoodley, Bernie Davis and Jamie Korab. They will be complemented by former Corner Brook mayor Jim Parsons, and Gander Deputy Mayor Bettina Ford, neither of whom are shrinking violets.
Wakeham, meanwhile, has talent aplenty on his front bench. The three members in this particular area, Conception Bay South MHA Barry Petten, Topsail – Paradise MHA Paul Dinn and Harbour Main MHA Helen Conway Ottenheimer, deserve senior roles in the new government.
On the Southern Shore, Ferryland PC Loyola O’Driscoll extended his majority against one of the Liberals’ very best candidates, Cheryl O’Brien, an intelligent, hardworking, well-spoken businesswoman and public servant. For much of election night it looked like O’Brien would make history by becoming the first Liberal to get elected on the Southern Shore in 54 years.
In fact, there was a lot of talent that didn’t get elected. If there was a prize for unsung heroes, PC candidate Darrell Hynes would certainly deserve it. He made a great showing against Liberal cabinet minister Sarah Stoodley. His dogged campaigning and talent for striking the right turn of phrase in media interviews must have made her nervous at times.
In Conception Bay South, Barry Petten beat recently retired Liberal MP and former mayor Ken McDonald by 3,060 votes to 2,043. The win wasn’t a surprise, but the size of it was. McDonald used to be one of the best campaigners around. This time, his ground game was missing. That was evident in the failure to identify supporters and get signs on their lawns. In our own case, his campaign manager didn’t return phone calls, and when he did finally check in, it was nine hours past deadline and he expected to get a prominent position for an ad in the paper after it was nearly all laid out.
The Liberal campaign generally seemed to lack something. Take their promise to build a new road in Paradise to relieve traffic congestion. Nobody in the Liberal camp had enough sense to invite the largest circulation media in Paradise to the event. We were deluged with press notices from the PCs and NDP throughout the campaign but didn’t receive a single press release from the Liberals. It was strange given The Shoreline is the only newspaper in the province distributed across 18 provincial electoral districts. So, while we were able to get the most important announcement of the election for the CBS area on the front page – Wakeham’s Topsail Beach press conference announcing an Urgent Care Centre for CBS – we were bereft of an equally important announcement for Paradise, because the Liberals didn’t let us know about it.
For our own part, we took pains to be fair. We asked the candidates of the two parties that stood a chance of forming government the very same questions and gave them all equal space in our pages. It would have been nice to give the NDP equal play, but there is only so much space and time during an election campaign. NDP Leader Jim Dinn deserves much credit for running an excellent campaign, and I am delighted to see Sheilagh O’Leary elected to the legislature.
Let me close by congratulating everyone who ran, whether you won or lost, or were even just a name on the ballot paper, and that includes your families. Some people say things to politicians they would never utter to anyone else thinking that because you have the gall to seek office you are fair game for vitriol. It takes guts to make yourself a target of the slings and arrows of politics. You and your loved ones are all comrades in the cause of democracy and deserve our respect. So thank you.