Tagged: Liberal Party of NS
Those permanent socialist hordes
Citing the latest of several Corporate Research Associates polls showing Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats with a comfortable lead, longtime Progressive Conservative Rob Smith has a piece in today’s AllNovaScotia.com [subscription required] proposing some form of Liberal-Tory co-operation to prevent what the news service alarmingly headlines, “Socialists forever.”
Beware of blue Bolsheviks!
This argument would be more persuasive if the Dexter Government had shown any sign of being either permanent or socialist. Dexter won office less than three years ago, and he did so by turning quietly away from the strident leftist approach of previous NDP leaders, and toward centrist policies where Nova Scotia voters have traditionally found their comfort zone. The phrase, “for today’s families,” doesn’t exactly call to mind Rosa Luxemburg.
The NDP’s historic breakthrough reflects two longterm political trends.
- As Western Canada and — to a lesser extent — Ontario turned sharply right over the last 20 years, Nova Scotia remained true to what might be called Red Tory values: We remain economically moderate and socially liberal. The widening gulf makes us look uncharacteristically leftish by comparison, but it’s the Uppity Canadian leopards who’ve changed their stripes, not us.
- Over the same period, party divisions within Nova Scotia have coalesced into three clear zones: Liberal Cape Breton; Tory rural mainland; and NDP Metro. Dexter won the last election on the strength of inroads not in Cape Breton, where he picked up no additional seats, but in the rural mainland, where loyal Tories winced at the Rodney Interregnum.
If Dexter were recklessly pursuing ideology over the province’s best interests, an opposition coalition might be in order. I believe the Harper government’s US Republican-style extremism should cause Liberals, New Democrats, and disaffected Stanfield Progressive Conservatives to explore avenues of co-operation.
But to argue that anything Dexter has done is so far outside the mainstream, or so redolent of permanent hegemony, as to inspire a Tory-Liberal Union is, forgive me Rob, just silly.
Orange is as orange does
Labor lawyer Ron Stockton, who is also president of the Lunenburg NDP Association, protests that the insulated lunch bags distributed to Grade Primary students in Nova Scotia the Annapolis, Cape Breton-Victoria, South Shore, and Strait regional school boards this month and next (and pictured here) do not appear to be NDP orange, but rather, red with orange trim.
If the government were Liberal would you have levelled the same criticism? If a PC government put out materials that were blue (admittedly a much more commonly used colour) would you have criticized them? At my age I like things to be as colourful as possible (just as I did when I was a kid). I love the look of it even though I may have used more orange than red and added a bit of glow-in-the-dark green.
The confusion is, I’m afraid, an artifact of the way computer screens reproduce color shades. The bag is NDP orange. Here’s a close-up:
Contrarian reader Paul Taylor asks a bonus question: Where were the bags manufactured and printed? For the answer, we turned to the information label affixed to the bag, as required by the Textile Labeling Act (apologies for the poor resolution):
That would be Sweda USA, an “integrated supplier and manufacturer of promotional products that provides innovative marketing solutions for the advertising specialties industry,” and China, a manufacturing powerhouse in Asia. Jobs here? Not so much.
And while on the subject of full disclosure, this is as good a time as any to reveal that last Friday, at 10:30 pm, I joined the federal New Democratic Party, just before the midnight deadline for qualifying to vote in the leadership race. I intend to vote for whichever candidate is most open to cooperating with the Liberals in defeating the Harper Government and allowing Canada’s moderate-left consensus to govern, probably this one. When the Liberal leadership voting deadline rolls around, I’ll probably join that party, if they’ll have me, with the same goal in mind. And I voted Conservative in two of the last three provincial elections. Go figure.
But I still think the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party should reimburse the province’s taxpayers for this shameless bit of political promotion aimed at schoolchildren and their parents.
The Liberal mailing list flap
On CBC Radio last week, Contrarian’s old friend Ralph Surette said Nova Scotia Liberals had dumped their last nine leaders — every one since Gerald Regan — before they could fight a second election.
That’s not quite true. The Liberals have had only seven leaders since Regan, and two of those took the party through two elections. Still, the record is fratricidal:
The operative question is whether the Liberals will repeat this pattern when they review leader Stephen McNeil’s leadership Friday. A covert campaign to unseat McNeil has featured an inept website and a mass mail-out using a purloined copy of the party’s email list.
Party president Derek Wells launched an investigation into this breach of party security, a move some criticized as merely prolonging a bad-news story for leader McNeil. I’m not so sure. It’s never pleasant or easy for a leader to fend off this kind of clandestine back-biting.
If anyone looks bad, it’s Deputy Leader Diana Whalen, who has never recovered from her bitterness at losing the 2007 leadership race to McNeil by 68 votes. Suspicion focused on Whalen when the source code for the unauthorized email turned up an address containing the letters, “dboudreau.”
Doug Boudreau, Whalen’s constituency assistant and the son of former Finance Minister and one-time leadership candidate Bernie Boudreau (who supported Whalen in the leadership campaign), offered an eyebrow-raising “no comment” when asked if he sent the email.
Confronted by reporters, Whalen fueled these suspicions by refusing to ask Boudreau whether he had done so, on grounds that she wouldn’t take part in “a witch hunt.” She didn’t say why asking an employee whether he made improper use of party lists constitutes a “witch hunt.”
Whalen likewise refuses to say whether she supports McNeil’s leadership, invoking the specious “principle” that party “elites” should not tell the rank and file how to vote.
This is tawdry behaviour. If Whalen wants McNeil defeated, she should have to ovaries to say so, publicly and forthrightly. If she wants McNeil to win the next election, common political sense dictates closing ranks behind him in the leadership review. Campaigning secretly to defeat him while maintaining a dubious public posture of neutrality doesn’t speak well of her integrity or her truthfulness.
Undermining McNeil is nothing new for Whalen. Readers may recall when then-Justice Minister Cecil Clarke got into hot water for refusing to allow a vote on a private member’s bill by Walen that would have established a committee to combat domestic violence. Clarke was retaliating against Whalen’s vote in committee to kill a bill cracking down on copper thieves (a bill other members of her caucus supported).
Whalen claimed fences, er, scrap metal dealers in her riding had not been given sufficient chance to review the bill. In fact, rampant theft of copper from live power lines posed a grave risk to public safety at the time, and Whalen had deliberately sabotaged a deal between the minority Tory government and the Liberal caucus to pass both bills. Given a chance undermine McNeil, the risk of potential electrocution didn’t factor in.
In the ensuing uproar, Clarke was accused of putting scrap metal ahead of battered women, a phony meme gullible (or lazy) press gallery reporters embraced with alacrity.
Barrow, MacFadden, and ‘Suitcase’ Simpson: the final chapter
Extortion.
That’s how the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia obtained the money it would be blocked from using by a government bill introduced in the legislature Tuesday. Liberal leader Stephen McNeil should think hard before crying victim.
Justice Minister Ross Landry, who introduced the bill, suggested the Liberals give the tainted funds to charity. A better idea would be to give it back to the provincial treasury, because that’s who they stole it from.
McNeil may think voters’ memories are too short to remember the details, but a few of us old coots are still around to remind them.
The money in question came from two ‘trust’ accounts, the Hawco and Howmur Funds. They came to light in the 1983 influence-peddling trial of three Nova Scotia Liberal Party fundraisers, Sen. Augustus Irvine Barrow, Clarence MacFadden, and the colorfully named James G. “Suitcase” Simpson.
The three bagmen oversaw a Liberal Party toll-gating scheme from 1970 to 1978, while Gerald Regan was premier. As the Supreme Court of Canada (R. v. Barrow, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 694) described it:
In October of 1970, the liberal party defeated the then Government of Nova Scotia in a general election and formed the new government which held power until 1978. During the period from 1970 to 1978, the Committee collected contributions amounting in total to $3,836,468.13, of which $2,770,773.52 was deposited in one bank account and $1,065,694.61 in the other. A police investigation commenced in the autumn of 1978 resulted in the seizure of many documents from government departments and agencies and also from several wineries, distilleries and other corporations. The evidence revealed that the contributions made by liquor and wine companies dealing with the government were based on a fixed amount per case of products sold to the Government. Other companies doing business with the government paid a percentage of monies they received from government work which ranged from three to five per cent.
Simpson plead guilty and paid a $75,000 fine. MacFadden and Barrow were found guilty at trial; MacFadden paid a $25,000 fine, but Barrow, for whom conviction would have meant expulsion from the Senate, appealed and won a new trial on a technicality. He was acquitted at a second trial.
At the first trial, Hugh Rynard, president of Acres Consulting Services Ltd., testified:
One of my functions was to insure that we as a company did whatever was necessary to improve our ability both in obtaining work and in execution of our work. And I was told that it would be in order for me to seek an appointment with Mr. Barrow.
Rynard and Barrow met on March 7, 1973 so Rynard could pitch the bagman on the company’s expertise. According to Rynard’s undisputed testimony, Barrow:
told me during that conversation that we would be expected to pay from three percent to five percent of the fees generated from Provincial Government work to the . . . into the coffers of the Liberal Party.
For years, the Liberal Party used interest off these secret funds to finance campaigns and, in at least one notorious example, to pay a secret salary to Liberal leader Vince MacLean.
The funds returned to the public spotlight in the early nineties, thanks to late George Hawkins, a courageous Liberal who spent years trying to convince fellow Party members to give up their ill-gotten gains, and apologize for taking them in the first place. “Since the beginning of the Regan administration,” Hawkins said, “the Liberal Party… has been living… from the proceeds of crime.”
Even before the Barrow-MacFadden trial, Hawkins knew the source of the money because, ironically, his father, a Liberal stalwart, had set up one of the funds. There is little doubt that Nova Scotia Conservatives carried out similar shakedowns during the Robert Stanfield and G.I. Smith administrations, but the party’s financial records were destroyed in a mysterious fire around the time the RCMP began making inquiries.
Thanks to pressure from Hawkins, the Liberal Party eventually agreed to audit the funds, and relinquish to the province any money that proved tainted. But as Kings College Journalism prof. Steven Kimber recounts, the party’s actions fell short of this promise:
After another year of obfuscating, the party released its so-called “audit,” which wasn’t. Instead, the auditors, “as specifically agreed,” only perused the actual trial transcript and identified $1,287,473.14 “proven or alleged to have been obtained” through kickbacks. “This procedure,” the auditors noted dryly, “does not constitute an audit.”
Liberal House Leader Manning MacDonald likes to pretend the funds were “cleansed many years ago” through this process, but this is malarkey. Most, if not all of the money that remains in the funds was stolen from the taxpayers of Nova Scotia.
Steven McNeil has a decision to make. Will he continue the long tradition of lying about the source of this money? Or will he support Bill 44, a measure that would finally put this sordid chapter of our history to rest?
Robo Ian or Principal Bert?
Today’s Antigonish by-election is a foregone conclusion. N-dip Moe Smith came within 275 votes of knocking off popular Tando MacIsaac in June’s general election. Tando having abandoned the seat so abruptly, and the NDP firmly ensconced in Province House, Smith will take the riding in a walk.
Inverness is a different matter. The riding is festooned with election signs in roughly equal numbers. Although then-Premier Rodney MacDonald out-polled his nearest rival by 3,431 votes in June, would-be Tory successor Allan MacMaster is widely expected to place third today. The premier’s abandonment of the riding, like Tando’s of neighboring Antigonish, will hurt MacMaster, as will the traditional Liberal stronghold’s penchant for snuggling up to the government side of the House.
Liberal Ian McNeil, a former CBC Radio host (and—disclosure—a friend of Contrarian’s), was widely regarded as the man to beat at the outset of the campaign. While hosting CBC-Cape Breton’s Information Morning program, McNeil endured a grueling three-hour daily commute to maintain his East Lake Ainslie home in the riding. A man with strong rural sensibilities, McNeil created the CBC’s Party Line feature, and he has hosted musical events and community forums in every fire hall and church basement in the county.
CBC-Cape Breton’s signal does not reach the southern end of the constituency, however. So McNeil is not as well known in riding’s largest population center, the town of Port Hawkesbury, where NDP candidate Bert Lewis is recently retired as principal of the Nova Scotia Community College campus. You have to wonder whether the 11th-hour NSCC strike settlement, details of which are conveniently unavailable, will help Lewis.
A much weaker NDP candidate placed second in June, a first for the party, albeit with only 20.5 percent of the vote. But it’s a government-prone riding, and this time, voters know which party is in government.
If McNeil loses, I suspect it will be because of a misstep. More than the other two candidates, he has blanketed the riding with robo-calls, and these aren’t sitting well with voters I’ve heard from.
Paving the way for Tories – another view [cont.]
The indefatigable Wallace J. McLean (note correct spelling; mea culpa) has risen to contrarian‘s challenge, and defended his view that the MacDonald government’s paving proposals were as politically skewed as the Harper government’s selective approvals thereof.
This time he buttresses his case with a map, using traditional party colors in two shades: darker for ridings in which the government proposed paving; lighter for those where it did not.
Turning this map back into numbers, the Rodney government proposed work in two out of six rural Liberal districts (33%); three out of eight rural NDP districts (38%), and 13 out of 21 rural PC districts. That’s 62% of them.
Contrarian concedes that McLean has demonstrated a provincial Tory skew from which many will impute deliberate bias. But the provincial skew does not approach the 4-to-1 edge the Harper-MacKay Reformers Conservatives bestowed upon their own ridings. In either case, the new NDP administration has a chance to banish this ancient and corrupt system by implementing its promise of a five year paving plan to get the politics out of paving..
Paving the way for Tories – another view
Some days ago, contrarian reader Wallace J. McLean challenged contrarian to determine how many of the paving projects Nova Scotia submitted for federal stimulus funding were in provincial Tory ridings. “Too much work,” we said, and went back to surfing Digg and Stumbledupon.
Well, turns out Wally is a blogger himself, and after days with a magnifying glass comparing project lists with the boundaries of Nova Scotia’s 52 provincial ridings, he offers an answer:
Of the 37 projects put forward by the late Macdonald government in NS, five were located in Liberal districts, and five in NDP districts, based on the 2006 election results…. Twenty-six were located in districts which the Tories held, or had won in 2006.
NDP & Grit riding associations race to avoid deregistration
Three NDP and one Liberal riding associations are racing to comply with financial disclosure requirements that could result in their deregistration. As reported earlier, the entire Green Party also faces imminent deregistration.
Joanne Lamey, provincial organizer for the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party confirmed that three NDP riding associations have been warned of possible deregistration for failure to disclose financial information.
She said financial statements for the Digby Annapolis, Yarmouth, and Inverness riding associations were in various stages of completion, and she expected to submit them “very quickly—perhaps this afternoon.”
Glennie Langille, who was co-chair of communications for the Liberal campaign, said one riding association had been asked to supply tardy financial statements, but she denied the deadline was imminent. She refused to identify the riding association because no official action had been taken against it. Read more »
Don’t tell Mom; she thinks I’m playing piano in a whorehouse
Victoria County Councillor Fraser Patterson, the NDP candidate in Victoria-The Lakes, scored a coup last week when he recruited fellow councillor Paul MacNeil to take him door-to-door in his home turf of Iona. The area is a Catholic Liberal bastion, and MacNeil’s family has been Liberal since before the flood.
At one stop, a homemaker poked her head out the door, eyed the two politicians, and said, “Paul, does you mother know what you’re doing?”
