James McLeod - Turmoil, as Usual: Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Road to the 2015 Election

2016, James McLeod

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing program.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McLeod, James, 1985-, author

Turmoil, as usual : politics in Newfoundland and Labrador and the road to the 2015 election / James McLeod.

ISBN 978-1-77103-081-6 (paperback)

1. Newfoundland and Labrador. House of Assembly--Elections, 2015. 2. Newfoundland and Labrador--Politics and government--2003-. 3. Elections--Newfoundland and Labrador. I. Title.

JL209.A5M5 2016 324.9718'05 C2015-908398-2

To Mom, who argued with me about writing, and Dad, who argued with me about politics, (and vice versa.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Paul Lane, the Honourable Member for Mount Pearl South, was on stage doing an absolutely amazing rendition of Rebel Yell by Billy Idol.

Twenty minutes earlier, Lane and I were huddled over the songbook at Karaoke Kops, a dingy George Street bar where all the staff dressed in cheesy police uniforms, and according to the bars slogan, Fun is the law. It was cramped in there, and the bar was very dark, with a smoke machine running flat-out. Green lasers and strobe lights framed the stage. A sign on the wall said, MOTHERS DAY SPECIALS: WHITE RUSSIANS $5.50 ALL LABATT BEER $3.95 HAPPY MOTHERS DAY in October. When I first walked in, a tough-looking guy with a heavily scarred face was belting out Brown Eyed Girl on stage. Hey, I wasnt going to be the one to tell him he didnt have the pipes to sing Van Morrison; he looked like he could kick my ass.

Lane and I were at Karaoke Kops for a mutual friends birthday, and we both looked pretty out of place.

It was past midnight and I was stone cold sober. Lane was nursing a beer, trying to look relaxed, without much success. He was clearly not there to cut loose. The fact that he was about 66 with a rumpled brown suit jacket draping over his hulking frame made him stick out a little bit.

I had no intention of getting up on that stage I dont have the voice to do Van Morrison either so I spent my time hanging out with Lane and goading him into singing something.

Hey! They have Do Re Mi from The Sound of Music. I think I could really nail that, I said.

I wouldve thought youre more of a The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Music kind of guy, Lane replied.

I was joking when I suggested that Paul do Rebel Yell.

He looked at me with a totally straight face and said, I can do that one.

I thought I was calling his bluff when I said Id go up to the managers booth at the front and put in the request, but Lane just said again, Yeah, I can do that one.

The jokes on me, I guess. When he got up on the stage, Paul Lane sang Rebel Yell better than Billy wouldve.

This book isnt a tell-all about Newfoundland and Labrador politics. Im not spilling secrets here. I dont know everything that happened in the last couple of years, and I still dont understand why a few things happened the way they did.

But as the political reporter for The Telegram, Newfoundland and Labradors largest daily newspaper, I followed the tumultuous politics of the province in recent years just about as closely as anybody could. Most of what I saw and heard has appeared in the newspaper in some form or another. If youre a faithful daily reader, this book likely wont offer any shocking revelations, but I hope youll find it worthwhile all the same. For one thing, there are some episodes like the encounter with Paul Lane at Karaoke Kops that just dont end up in print. Moreover, daily news coverage can be frantic and hard-boiled, and it can obscure the larger narrative arc of events that play out across weeks or months. Above all, that narrative is what Im trying to convey here.

Im sure some of the players who are mentioned in these pages will say that I missed the real story. They may even be right. This is only what I saw, what I was told, and what I believed to be true at the time when I wrote it.

My fervent hope is that whether youre a diehard political junkie, or a casual citizen interested in learning more about the people who run our government, within these pages youll learn one or two new things about Newfoundland and Labrador.

And I hope youll laugh. Politics can be weighty business, but its also often farce. None of this should be taken too seriously.

It was the absurdity of it all that first caused me to start writing things down. This book began as a lengthy email I sent to my friend Bekah following the September 2013 Progressive Conservative Party convention. This is my second year covering this event, and it's unbelievably bloody weird, I wrote to Bekah.

In the newspaper story I wrote about the convention, I focused largely on then-premier Kathy Dunderdales comments in a series of speeches she gave over the course of the weekend. I also wrote a separate blog post for the newspapers website about the Tories farcical policy debates at the convention. Absent from my reporting, though, was anything about an old lady threatening to kill me for my political coverage, or Dunderdale trying to pull me out onto the dance floor as party members cut loose on a Saturday evening.

These little bits the bloody weird bits tend to fall by the wayside because theyre not consequential in the truest sense of the word, and therefore theyre not deemed to have much place in serious news reporting. In the space of a 500-word newspaper article, the priority is on the hard facts of what a politician said, what it means for public policy and how it will impact the ups and downs of political strategy. The colour and flavour of politics, the human dynamics, and the absurdity of it all frequently gets lost in the grind of daily news coverage.

So thats what I wrote in my email to Bekah, and thats what I kept writing for another two years afterwards.

The rest of this book should be read as such as a long email to a friend. After emailing Bekah, any semblance of stability within the N.L. political world went all to hell. There were three and a half premiers in the space of one year. The New Democrats imploded in spectacular fashion. The Liberals well the Liberals were there for it all, too.

But Im getting ahead of myself.

The title of this book is cribbed from N.L. political giant John Crosbie, who has a much, much longer memory for politics in this province than I do. If Crosbie says that Newfoundland and Labrador is usually in turmoil, I wont presume to argue. All the same, I do think you can make a case that the two years leading up to the 2015 election were among the most turbulent in the provinces history.