After suffering through another minister-splaining natural resource lecture from Siobhan Coady, her clunky and hesitant defense of not being involved in the awarding of this oil consultant contract made every watcher doubt this government.
This is where I usually like to say that you can’t make this stuff up. But in this case, you can. That’s because she next uttered the term “OilCo”.
After I got up off the floor and stopped coughing, snorting and laughing, I wondered if maybe Peter Parker could secure the next interview with Coady. That would surely set the devil in the Green Goblin and jeopardize his plans for OilCo and world domination.
Then I reviewed the cast of characters:
A premier’s aide, an executive from the government’s Crown corporation and the lottery recipient himself.
Seems like all the requisite players. Screenwriting, by way of paint-by-numbers, I guess.
We saw this plot already this year with the Carla Foote/The Rooms thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good Hallmark movie as much as the next guy, but this is getting altogether too much.
And, by the way, creating a subsidiary of a Crown corporation? Isn’t that like a subsidiary of a subsidiary? To strategize for our future role in oil and gas. Really?
How could they not see that that would add to the cynicism. (Note to the communications folks: you tell them to say the word subsidiary, we hear “shell company”).
And, by waiving conflict of interest so that it could all be put in place, they left no doubt that they wanted this to be exposed. This crew couldn’t get out of their own way if they tried.
It’s so disrespectful to all who voted in the last election.
It might be explainable if this was one of those arrogant, bloated majority governments from the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s. I’ll spare you. Liberal or Progressive? Interchangeable.
But this is a razor-thin minority government that still hasn’t learned.
We reinstalled them as a minority for a reason: we weren’t too happy with your last performance.
So, the arrogance is still there and I can only conclude that despite claiming they would be different from past governments on the issue of appointments and contracting and such, they presume we are OK with it all.
I envy provinces that have grown to support their third and fourth-place political parties over time because they really needed to shape and inform those parties to become alternatives. It’s the only choice left. Some of those provinces even created new parties and installed them in less than three years from when they were created.
It shouldn’t have taken us this long to learn.
Shame on Dwight Ball for The Rooms issue and this Nalcor consulting contract.
Shame on us for enabling it, yet again.
It’s incumbent on us to become part of the solution and stop rewatching this movie.
Mark Power,
St. John’s
