How Blue was my valley?
Waterford Valley By-Election Notes
Tom Osborne controlled every aspect of his exit from politics not because he was a political genius but because the Premier’s Office let him have full control by default. From May 24 when he told the world he was going to July 5 when he walked out the Confederation Building door, Tom ran it all. The reason there’s a temporary health minister is because Andrew Furey’s Brain Trust assumed they had until the *end* of July to sort themselves out. They didn't know Tom was walking out when he left. When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me, ass the old saying goes. That’s the level of amateurism we are talking about.
Look at his dates and you can get a clue about what was going on and why Tom may have chosen the dates. Don’t forget, Tom *told* Andrew Furey in early March he was leaving, having already lined up a gig as the general manager of the milk marketing board. July 6 was the second anniversary of Tom’s appointment as health minister. He walked out the day before his second anniversary. But no one in the Premier's Office used the four months notice to get ready or to nail down an exact date.
Now there’s a by-election looming.
Andrew Furey has until September 5 to call a by-election and the polling date cannot be later than the 5th of October, since polling day must be no more than 30 days after an election call under provincial law. Furey might go by the end of July or early August but frankly, he could just as easily let it run to the end and have a by-election in August. He and his office weren't ready to go sooner than planned and they were expecting a later date. We’ll see what happens.
As it stands right now, Furey has only one candidate: the unimpressive city councillor, real estate salesman Jamie Korab. As with other by-elections and no shortage of pleading and worn out pant-knees from grovelling, the Liberals have not been able to find anyone else. Not a one. That’s been the norm for the Liberals who, since 2015, have always seemed like a worn-out bunch at the end of their mandate rather than a fresh batch of faces with energy and new ideas.
When was the last contested Liberal nomination? Maybe against John Abbott in the 2021 general election, when the Brain Trust on the 8th ran Kathy Dunderdale’s former communications director as their star candidate against John Abbott. Abbott had been Furey’s rival for the leadership and has since become one of the strongest ministers Furey has even if he’s treated like crap by the Brain Trustthst tried to get rid of him. Other than that, there haven’t been very many contested nominations for the incumbent party. No stars either, which is even more telling about the party’s internal operations and the way the public views them.
By contrast the Pea Seas have two candidates. One is a former Pea Sea comms staffer who the Dwight Ball Liberals bizarrely kept in place along with all the other political staffers the Pea Seas left behind. Ball’s chief of staff once offered your humble e-scribbler a list of the hundreds of Pea Seas Paul Davis’ crowd had left behind in the public service. The fellow got genuinely put out at the reply, which was that a year after the Liberals took office, the story was about Liberal incompetence at not getting rid of the Pea Seas not Pea Sea treachery.
And it wasn’t even incompetence, really. Ball’s crowd had deliberately kept them all in place for unfathomable reasons. Liberal staffers will not fare as well as the Pea Sea ones did so even Pat Parfrey, Rob Greenwood, and Steve Tomblin among others should forget any hopes of surviving if the Pea Seas take the government in what now looks like a general election next year. Next year maybe. Unless something else happens and Andrew Furey slides the date back for the third or fourth time.
The other Pea Sea is a former Mountie and provincial public servant. Here’s how he highlights his experience on his Facebook announcement:
Provincial Public Servant 1992-2013 (Youth Corrections, Addiction Treatment Councillor, Police Dispatch, R.N.C Officer)
Foster Parent (Province of Newfoundland and Labrador) 2000-2004
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer 2013-2020
Co-Founder- RNC Workplace Program
Member Workplace Advisor- RCMP
Peer to Peer Counselor- RCMP
Co-Chair- OHS Advisory Council of NL
Province of NL Premier’s Award for Volunteerism 2019
And the Pea Seas almost had a third candidate.
In the background, the Pea Sea organization has been getting better, with two victories under the belt. Tom’s mother - former MHA Sheila Osborn - is reputedly hanging out openly with her Blue team friends again and in his new job, Tom is politically neutralized. He cannot campaign and frankly, given the way he went out the door, it doesn’t seem like he wants to have too much to do with the Liberals any more anyway.
That’s important to understand since Tom won this seat on his own. Before he crossed the floor to the Liberals Tom had been a successful Pea Sea backbencher and then cabinet minister before falling from grace. The Osborg family political machine was potent and Tom’s personal vote won’t feel obliged to stick with the Red people now that Tom isn’t Red any more. A picture of Sheila going door to door for whoever the Pea Sea candidate will send a powerful message the Liberals would be hard-pressed to counter.
There’s a lot riding on this riding this time. The Liberals have lost two of the last three by-elections and they only won Conception Bay East - Bell Island by a whisker. The current configuration of this district lumps the usually Pea Sea Kilbride and The Goulds with stretches of the old St. John’s South district that has been both Pea Sea and Liberal over the last 30 years. Their candidate is not connected to the district at all so the Liberals have an uphill struggle for local connections to give their candidate any selling points.
The Liberals need to win. Desperately. The two by-election losses have shaken Liberal morale. A loss in this seat would likely push many existing cabinet ministers out the door. Some are already planning to retire but in the context it will be too easy to assume they are just part of the rush to the lifeboats in a lost cause rather than natural retirements for usual reasons.
Andrew Furey, who barely won his first election, does not have *any* political mojo to apply here to counteract the panic likely to follow a defeat. He’s had lots of great advice from lots of powerful, experienced political people. But Furey’s one defining characteristic is that - like Dwight Ball - he ignores every piece of good political advice he’s ever gotten from anyone. It's not a strong rep to work with.
Liberal supporters talked about Pat Parfrey as health minister and the candidate instead of Korab. That is like talk of a deal with Quebec - there is zero sign of it - or some other miracle. It shows the Liberals have no coherent leadership. It shows the party volunteers and staffers are left to their own devices rather than rely on solid direction from the top. Worried and desperate people grasp at anything to imagine the disaster they think is coming will not happen. They make up any story to fill in the gap between reality and they they hope will happen to save their hides. Thing is, if Liberals lose this one, desperation will be hard to keep down. Desperate political parties often become like the Donner party and start eating their own. Watch out for political cannibalism in the weeks after, if the Liberals lose this one.
For the Pea Seas, even a strong second place is a win for them. It’s good experience for the team, their morale will go up, and they’ll push on to the next by-election, which may come sooner than anyone else expects and long before Andrew Furey would risk a general election. Frankly, the fact the Pea Seas have two candidates no matter their qualifications and background is better than one candidate whose announcement was so poor he had to clarify which party he was running for.
That’s an unusually large amount of political weight riding on the outcome of a by-election.
That’s also a sign of how weak the political leadership is in the province at the moment in all parties. There’s zero strategic thought at all. The thinking is even less than tactical if that’s even possible. We’ve had the fate of the government party and the likelihood of an election hanging on the outcome of one by-election after another with no big issues from either Liberals or Pea Seas either to take anyone’s attention or give them a cause to rally around.
This seat is not a safe Liberal bet. Nor is it a shoo-in for the Pea Seas.
It will be powerful political theatre, though.
Get your popcorn and get ready for a hot and important vote sometime in the next two or three months.
Shoo-in not shoe-in.