NOT JUST EDDIE JOYCE; KIRBY AND THE PREMIER SHOULD GO, TOO

On Saturday the Tories elected a new Party leader. That’s nice. But will he lead? There has been no effective Opposition for at least a decade. Nor has leadership come from the Government benches over the same period, either.

When the economy is going well, business is booming and employment rates are high, leadership of all kinds — especially political leadership — is a commodity taken for granted. Governments play an important role in this economy, even if far too often it is with a negative effect. 

Perhaps it is in the nature of societies to think that things happen for no particular reason. 

Truth is, that’s rarely the case. 

The inability to lead, to be proactive, to have a nose for crisis, and to be willing to undergo the stress of intervention, is at the heart of the Liberal Government’s latest crisis, too.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES FIASCO: BUMPKINS ON A "B" TEAM

Education Minister Dale Kirby is “surprised that about half the people who attended a consultant session on the future of libraries in Newfoundland and Labrador walked out in frustration”, according to the CBC. Kirby shouldn't be “surprised” at all. It was an appropriate response by a public aghast that politics is so badly broken in this province.

When an elected Government sends out an accounting firm to perform a role politicians are expected to do daily — on a completely non-accounting issue, one that has no technical underpinnings — you know you have elected the “B-Team”.

Don’t misunderstand. It’s not as if we had the option of electing an “A-Team”. That wasn’t on offer by any Party. But the Liberals are so oblivious to the purpose of politics, and their role in it, that we are left to worry not just they are second-rate but that they are a team for which the “B” stands for “bumpkins”. The terminology is deliberate. It refers to those who are more ignorant than uneducated.

This Government should have realized that it miscalculated on the library closures in the first place; that the attempt to save $1 million — when the real goal ought to have been saving several hundred million — was not just silly, it detracted from achieving the larger target.