The waiting must be irking him. After all, he has known — as everybody has known — for about a year that he will be the next premier. With that certainty on the horizon, anyone would be eager to get on the job and start working — and in the case of being premier, that means treating the citizenry with condescension and contempt.
It is a unique moment in the province’s history. There’s not one, but two party leaders behaving like a premier.
The thin air up on the 8th floor must affect politicians’ synapses. With news this week that a recent poll shows the provincial NDP rising in popularity, Ball aimed his derision directly at NDP Leader Earle McCurdy, calling the leftist former fishery fighter and Unifor unionist “one-dimensional.”
“That’s it!” many a Newfoundlander (and Labradorian) must have exclaimed upon hearing the slur. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for to describe Dwight Ball.”
After all, Ball is the guy whose singular strategy since becoming Liberal leader has been to simply wait for time to pass, knowing the citizenry will do what is expected of them and vote the Tories to the wilderness, while bending a knee and begging the Liberals to bring salvation.
Everybody knows the script. The province goes through it every decade or two, most recently in 2003.
The problem with merely waiting, and doing and saying nothing of substance, as Ball has done while time passes and his date with destiny — Nov. 30 — comes closer, is that unexpected and unpredictable things can happen to upset the unfolding of the political universe as it should.
In the case of Ball the Silent, the Orange Tsunami coming out of Alberta is an unwelcome surprise that has the potential to make his road to Nov. 30 slightly more uphill than he had planned.
The NDP’s victory in the recent Alberta provincial election has already had an impact on Canadian politics, as shown by the rise in popularity of the federal NDP and leader Tom Mulcair, and by two polls released this week by Corporate Research Associates (CRA) in Halifax.
According to one CRA poll, the federal NDP in Atlantic Canada has more than doubled its popularity in the past three months, going from 14 per cent support among decided voters to 29 per cent.
At the same time, the federal Liberals fell to 43 per cent from 56 per cent, and the federal Conservatives dropped to 24 per cent from 26 per cent.
There’s statistical evidence of the Orange Wave so many people have been talking about.
Provincially, One-dimension Earle and his NDP are supported by 22 per cent of decided voters, up from 13 per cent in February.
Ball’s Liberals are still coasting toward victory with 50 per cent support, albeit down from 56 per cent, and Premier Paul Davis’s crew of Tories inexplicably, amazingly, almost impossibly maintains 27 per cent support, down from 31 per cent.
What this all means — federally, mostly, but perhaps also provincially — was summed up succinctly by CRA in releasing the poll results: “It appears that the Alberta victory has increased the legitimacy of the NDP as a viable alternative to the Conservatives and Liberals.”
At this point, two question arise about Nov. 30. First, how large will the Liberal majority be? And second, will Newfoundland voters abandon their naïve reliance on Liberal/Tory dominance and elect enough NDPers to have a truly three-party legislature, perhaps even with an Orange official opposition?
Brian Jones is a copy editor at The Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected].
The waiting must be irking him. After all, he has known — as everybody has known — for about a year that he will be the next premier. With that certainty on the horizon, anyone would be eager to get on the job and start working — and in the case of being premier, that means treating the citizenry with condescension and contempt.
It is a unique moment in the province’s history. There’s not one, but two party leaders behaving like a premier.
The thin air up on the 8th floor must affect politicians’ synapses. With news this week that a recent poll shows the provincial NDP rising in popularity, Ball aimed his derision directly at NDP Leader Earle McCurdy, calling the leftist former fishery fighter and Unifor unionist “one-dimensional.”
“That’s it!” many a Newfoundlander (and Labradorian) must have exclaimed upon hearing the slur. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for to describe Dwight Ball.”
After all, Ball is the guy whose singular strategy since becoming Liberal leader has been to simply wait for time to pass, knowing the citizenry will do what is expected of them and vote the Tories to the wilderness, while bending a knee and begging the Liberals to bring salvation.
Everybody knows the script. The province goes through it every decade or two, most recently in 2003.
The problem with merely waiting, and doing and saying nothing of substance, as Ball has done while time passes and his date with destiny — Nov. 30 — comes closer, is that unexpected and unpredictable things can happen to upset the unfolding of the political universe as it should.
In the case of Ball the Silent, the Orange Tsunami coming out of Alberta is an unwelcome surprise that has the potential to make his road to Nov. 30 slightly more uphill than he had planned.
The NDP’s victory in the recent Alberta provincial election has already had an impact on Canadian politics, as shown by the rise in popularity of the federal NDP and leader Tom Mulcair, and by two polls released this week by Corporate Research Associates (CRA) in Halifax.
According to one CRA poll, the federal NDP in Atlantic Canada has more than doubled its popularity in the past three months, going from 14 per cent support among decided voters to 29 per cent.
At the same time, the federal Liberals fell to 43 per cent from 56 per cent, and the federal Conservatives dropped to 24 per cent from 26 per cent.
There’s statistical evidence of the Orange Wave so many people have been talking about.
Provincially, One-dimension Earle and his NDP are supported by 22 per cent of decided voters, up from 13 per cent in February.
Ball’s Liberals are still coasting toward victory with 50 per cent support, albeit down from 56 per cent, and Premier Paul Davis’s crew of Tories inexplicably, amazingly, almost impossibly maintains 27 per cent support, down from 31 per cent.
What this all means — federally, mostly, but perhaps also provincially — was summed up succinctly by CRA in releasing the poll results: “It appears that the Alberta victory has increased the legitimacy of the NDP as a viable alternative to the Conservatives and Liberals.”
At this point, two question arise about Nov. 30. First, how large will the Liberal majority be? And second, will Newfoundland voters abandon their naïve reliance on Liberal/Tory dominance and elect enough NDPers to have a truly three-party legislature, perhaps even with an Orange official opposition?
Brian Jones is a copy editor at The Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected].
