CAN FABIAN SURVIVE AN ABC CAMPAIGN....PERHAPS.

A long time ago, I learned that the best way to gauge public opinion was to listen to the common person on the street, in the restaurant, in the coffee shop, in the line-up at the bank, in a taxi or while I was getting my haircut.

Over the past few days I have been on a covert mission to gauge the potential strength of federal Conservative Fabian Manning. This is a fella who developed a cult-like following when he was stripped of his duties as parliamentary secretary and booted out of the Provincial Progressive Conservative Caucus for having the audacity to break ranks with the provincial government over its production quota plan for the crab industry. At the time Manning told the media, "I fought to stay … where my heart was" and "at the present time, that option is not there."

He sat as an independent from May of 2005 until he resigned his seat in December of that year to seek the Conservative nomination in the federal riding of Avalon. In the general election of 2006 he was elected as the lone Conservative gain in Atlantic Canada with 53% of the popular vote.

Fabian again found himself on the other side of the Premier when he decided to toe the party line and support the 2007 federal budget. The Premier called him, and the province's other Conservative MPs, "traitors, yes men for Stephen Harper." The province's federal representative in the Harper government, Loyola Hearn, fired back, saying that he had not seen anyone work harder for the province than Fabian Manning. He went on to say that “Danny Williams is not worthy of carrying Fabian Manning’s shoes."

For his part Manning, despite heavy public and political pressure to vote against the Conservative budget, stayed the course. The populist MP told the House of Commons, "Our government has kept its commitment to honour and respect the Atlantic Accord," and "We are delivering 100 per cent of what the accord promised, not 50 per cent, and without a cap. Unfortunately, Premier Williams does not share our commitment to a strong economy and wants to pick a fight instead. Would the Minister of Natural Resources explain the damage that Premier Williams is causing the people of Newfoundland and Labrador?"

The war of words between the federal Conservatives and the provincial Progressive Conservatives continued right up until the Prime Minister's visit to the province this weekend when a lull in hostilities was called.

Friday night the Prime Minister attended an election style rally (no report on whether any members of the provincial PC caucus attended) in Holyrood with his future Newfoundland and Labrador cabinet minister, Fabian Manning. The PM signed Fabian's nomination papers and started the counter offensive for his party's best chance to survive an anticipated ABC campaign led by Premier Williams, who all but annihilated the opposition in the recent provincial election.

There were some reminders of the bitter feeling towards the Harper Conservatives, and the uphill battle they face in Newfoundland and Labrador, as a number of people protested the Prime Minister's visit, demanding he keep his promises on equalization made in the heat of the 2006 campaign.

For now the Premier has left the ball in the Prime Minister's court. The ABC campaign is still on, and will remain on, unless the federal government finds a way to provide the province with $11 billion in revenue that the Premier claims will be lost as a result of changes made in the 2007 federal budget. The Premier may not have imposed a deadline for Harper to meet the alleged shortfall but on Saturday federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion hinted that his party may bring the Harper minority government down before the spring budget.

So what chance does Manning have if the ABC campaign is not called off? Considering the uproar in this province following last year's federal budget, you would think none at all! However, after a few days of questioning non-partisan observers throughout the riding, I am not prepared to rule him out. The Southern Shore and the Cape Shore are going to stay loyal to one of their own. Fabian is a populist with deep roots at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. I hear that Conservative polling shows that the party is tracking well among the religious right, who can and will deliver their influential vote in the Avalon Riding. Something tells me that the Premier's ABC call will be a second consideration to the Conservatives' anti-abortion and "family values" platforms. Manning will also hold onto the loyalty of crab fishermen and plant workers with whom he sided in 2005. This leaves two potential battlegrounds, the top of Trinity Bay - Harbor Grace and vote-rich Conception Bay South. The Conservatives have done the math and they have a plan. Minister Fabian Manning is their best bet of salvaging a seat in Newfoundland and Labrador in an all-out, no-holds-barred battle with Danny Williams.

SELLING TICKETS IN A CASHLESS SOCIETY

The Virginia Park Elementary School Council has been running its second annual 50/50 fund raiser over the past month. Initially, I had some misgivings about using a lottery as a fund raiser. As well, I do not enjoy asking people to purchase tickets even if it is for a good cause.

School councils still have to raise lots of cash to assist students with the costs of field trips, to subsidize extra-curricular activities (like swimming and skating) and to provide new infrastructure in the school like computers, phonic ears and the like. The current provincial government has made education a priority. As parents we have all benefited from the elimination of school fees, free textbooks, smaller classes and other improvements. However, there is still a way to go. For example, our council was forced to foot the bill when the school's server for the computer network had to replaced. One would think that something as essential as a server would be the school board's responsibility, but no, the $10,000 bill was borne by the school council. The money raised through recycling, the spring fair, donations and last year's 50/50 draw were the source of funding which ensured that teachers and students were networked together. That was hard-raised money that I believe should have been used for other things.

At 9:00 this morning we trudged up to the Wal-Mart on Stravanger Drive with a float, hundreds of tickets, two chairs and a table. This was my duty as a parent and chair of the school council. Pestering frantic Christmas shoppers in a crowded store on a Saturday was not something that I looked forward to doing.

I spent seven hours peddling tickets with Paula, another council member. Dozens of people averted eye contact as they breezed by our little table. I thought perhaps our presentation was not attractive enough to warrant a second look so I scurried over to a display and borrowed a pitcher plant (I mean a poinsettia) and liberated a mechanical dancing tree for strategic placement on our table. Than it dawned on me that the majority of people are not carrying cash these days.

What amazed me was the number of people who actually stopped to chat, and say "I feel bad, I do not have any change on me right now." A few minutes later, after going through the checkout, they would return with five or ten dollars to purchase some tickets and help our cause. I really enjoyed the experience. I met some great people and experienced the sincere generosity of my fellow Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. I feel bad for misleading all the folks who made me promise they were buying the winning ticket.

People just do not carry cash anymore. How many times have I pulled into Tim Horton's only to realize that I am penniless and my debit card is useless. We have become dangerously reliant on computer banking. I like using my interac and credit cards. It provides me with a permanent and world wide accessible online record of my spending.

So just out of curiosity: How much cash do you carry around in your wallet or purse? Have you bought into the electronic commerce? What is the optimal amount of cash one should keep with one? Just how reliant are you on e-commerce?

RAISING VOTER PARTICIPATION

I am not sure if I should be putting ideas in people's heads but this story from Thailand made my morning. It seems that some candidates in that country are in for some stiff justice after handing out Viagra to older voters.

There just may be some public policy uses for the magic blue pill right here. I wonder if a little political Viagra might help lift the performance anxiety of the official opposition in this province .

Our premier might want to consider giving couples free Viagra to assist in his mission to increase our birthrate. The $1000 incentive is a good start but what about daycare, tuition, clothing costs and the cost of a mortgage for the new house with the extra bedrooms.

According to the home economics section of Manitoba Agriculture, "the basic goods and services necessary to maintain physical and social well-being" of a child from birth to age three cost $37,000. From birth to nine years costs $91,000, and from birth to 18 costs $154,492. Of course, actual expenditures will vary depending on income, goals, values and choices, but the Manitoba Agriculture estimate provides a basic benchmark.

"Gonna need a little more than a blue pill and $1000.00 to get me reproducing", says one of my co-workers. You think!

FOR THE LOVE OF MEEPLES

The weekend is here and that means at least one night of playing my favorite board games with friends. For those of you who have not yet jumped on the bandwagon, board games are going through a great revival. Folks are abandoning their keyboards (for a couple of hours at least) to enjoy some social interaction with friends. Families are sitting on the floor again and actually interacting with each other instead of just staring at a screen.

I am proud to say that I am a board game geek. That said, there is no doubt in my mind that board gaming has reached the tipping point where players will soon be in the mainstay. No I am not talking about your garden variety monopoly or scrabble.

Over a year ago a couple of friends, the Snelgroves, who have children the same age as ours, invited us over for dinner. Lynette was eager to teach us a game that their oldest son had gotten for Christmas. I have to be honest, at first I was a little apprehensive, a kids game! Kristine and I learned the rules of Carcassone and we have not turned back. It has brought out the competitive side of my wife and restored my old love for board games left behind in the glory days of my time at MUN. Those weekends of Risk, Diplomacy, Axis and Allies with Tom, Ken, Scott, Garry and the rest of the gangs from the society corridor in the old Thompson Student Center.

Carcassone is like a soft drug, your entry level variety. However once hooked you start craving more. Last Christmas Santa brought me a bunch of new games courtesy of our game adviser in Waterloo.

In the the Nineties the great German board game designers starting gaining some notoriety with a different kind of board game. These german board games or “designer games” were strategic games that were more engaging than the traditional party game. They changed the way games were played by adopting many of the mechanisms used in computer gaming. Some of these new games did not even have boards in a traditional sense and the scoring and dice mechanics changed.

Board games became socially acceptable pasttimes in Europe, especially Germany. This wasn’t a phenomenon that was segregated to a certain age group, whole families played games, as did teenagers and adults. In Europe, board games began to bring in similar revenues as movies and computer games.

It took some time but these new games slowly made their way across the pond into fringe markets in North America. Mostly it seems at university campuses, graduate houses and obscure comic stores. People began to learn games from friends. Word of mouth advertising that left new converts thinking “Why had I not heard of this before?"

Which is what has happened to us. From my seven year old Aidan to my mom and dad (you know it is fun and not overly complicated when your fisherman father forgoes poker to play Ticket To Ride). I am constantly pushing German style games and trying to win over converts. People at first are very sheepish (inside joke) when you mention playing a game. There is some strange stigma attached. Once they play they are hooked. The magic happens when you sit down and play a game, you realize what all the fuss is about. Game are easy to learn but deep enough to keep an intelligent person’s attention. Sure we still listen to a few tunes and drink lots of wine, martinis and rum.

Gaming is fun and a very social way to spend a Friday night, Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. Did I caution you that they are addictive?

If you're interested, here a couple of t links.

Board Game Geek
Ticket To Ride
Carcasonne
The Settlers Of Catan

I feel there is a sufficiently large part of the population who are looking for more intelligent entertainment, especially when that entertainment can be shared with their friends and families.

There are at least three decent game shops in St. John’s. I have purchased from all three and urge folks to consider doing the same. Games are a little more expensive here than on-line but it is nice to support local business.

PIGGIES AT THE TROUGH NOMINATIONS

Ed Hollett over at The Bond Papers has written a spirited defense of former Liberal Cabinet Minister Oliver Langdon. I should state from the top that I never much liked Oliver Langdon and the feeling is pretty much mutual.

The Telegram is determined to keep the House Of Assembly Spending Scandal issue alive. Through freedom of information requests and meticulous research they are piecing together what many consider to be inappropriate expenditures of members allowances. While many of the questionable expenditures seem to be legally legitimate, the pressure put on individuals through The Telegram has certainly seen the public treasury recover some money it might not have gotten without a little embarrassment in the court of public opinion.

Now back to twists of Oliver Langdon, or more to the point, Ed Holllet’s defense of the indefensible. Normally, I would say without hesitation that if you read it on The Bond Papers you can take it to the bank. Unfortunately, that is not the case this time.

I spoke to a bunch of people yesterday at the House Of Assembly, former staff and a couple of people who are still employed as legislative assistants. These folks, the ones who prepare travel claims and approve them, have never heard of different compensation rates for MHA travel. The amount of money reimbursed for private vehicle usage is a fixed amount for all travel. So for argument's sake lets say an MHA, or the person that inspects elevators, gets reimbursed at $.35 a km when using his or her own vehicle. That is the rate for all travel on the provinces highways. There is no distinction between intra district travel and travel to the capital and back.

Poor Oliver. He was on the road all the time. Wearing out vehicles, racing up the and down the Burin Peninsula to get to his district. Fortune Bay -Cape-La Hune was created in 1996. There are no communities on the Burin Peninsula in his seat. The access points to his district are not all that convoluted. One takes a left on the TCH to go down route 360 to Bay d'Espoir . On the Western side of his district you take the Burgeo Highway (route 480) to Burgeo and jump on a ferry to get to Ramea. Fairly straightforward, yes. Not too difficult to keep track of at all. What is so onerous about keeping accurate mileage records? He had staff to keep track of all that stuff, did he not? No doubt someone kept track of when those Leafs were playing so those season passes did not go to waste.

The Bond Papers suggests that Langdon must have gone through cars at an incredible rate. Apparently, wear and tear on Langdon’s vehicles was an incredible expense. It would be interesting to know just how much of this private vehicle travel was done in rentals as opposed to the member’s private car. As well, it would be interesting to learn how many trips a year the member made to Grey River, McCallum and Francois, the three centrally located isolated communities along the south coast, and if he visited them by ferry or availed of a helicopter? In either case he did not drive there. Yet, he was able to claim the distance to them every time he visited his district because they helped form mid point of his district. Come on!


This is a man who spend a great part of his life in service to the people of the south coast at a time of great economic and demographic change. He was a model constituency politician who attempted to make it to every community meeting and event. It should be noted that Oliver Langdon did not fudge a travel claim, he did not mislead the accountants at the House Of Assembly. He did not commit fraud. He has not done anything illegal. At worst he was given bad advice by the House Of Assembly whose own auditors approved the generous travel compensation arrangement, again and again. He followed the rules. If anything this just illustrates, once again, how poorly MHA’s constituency accounts were overseen by the bureaucrats entrusted with that responsibility

That does not mean that Oliver Langdon had to charge the mid-point rate 262 times. (cha ching!). He could have just submitted private vehicle expenses for the actual distances traveled. He, and he alone, elected to go with the higher amount based on kilometers not traveled. His rationale, that he could so he did, just makes it all the worse.

He should repay any monies that he might have received for kilometers he did not drive. The court of public opinion sees no rationale for this so called special arrangement that Langdon had. The idea that a member could claim a base rate of kilometers that factored in charters to isolated communities for each and every trip to the district is baffling and bizarre. It was not a practical fit and certainly it did not average out in favor of the taxpayer. You get reimbursed for travel actually incurred. Not a penny more or not a penny less. That makes sense. Hats off to The Tely!

PASSION YES, BUT NEVER PASSION WITHOUT LOGIC

As a young fella working for the Hon. Roger Simmons in Ottawa, I had the good fortune to meet Senator Eugene Forsey one afternoon in the Members' Common Room, behind the curtains leading to the floor of the House of Commons. He told me that he had a connection to Newfoundland, and it turned out that the little outport where I grew up was just up the coast from where he was born.

That was just the first of a number of conversations with an individual whom I grew to respect. I was proud to present his brief to the Special Committee to Study the Proposed Companion Resolution to the Meech Lake Accord, in St. John’s, chaired by Jean Charest. Sadly, he died shortly thereafter. Forsey profoundly influenced my desire to participate and inform.

Considering the shellacking I have received for assisting to organize the Unity Rally (obviously I had become a Tory), maligning the Provincial Minister of Education over school issues (he must be getting ready to run for the Liberals) or my decision to assist the NDP Leader in her successful re-election bid in Signal-Hill Quidi Vidi (how does one pronounce “Quidi Vidi?”), it should not come as a surprise that I idolize a man who started out as a conservative, became a socialist, than was appointed as a Liberal Senator, who later broke ranks with that party and sat as an independent.

One member of the Liberal Caucus, a sometimes nemesis, once remarked that people did not trust me because no one really knew what my agenda was. He used to always ask me what I wanted and what my long term plan was? What is your game plan? The answer is that I am not sure, one thing is for certain I am ambivalent about partisan politics as a career.

My wife gets mortified just about every time I get on the phone in preparation for a conversation with Bill, Linda or Randy. She just shrugs her shoulders as I eagerly wait for the latest letter to the editor to make it to the papers. Some people say that only crazy people write letters to the editor or talk up issues.. Crazy or not, I believe in participatory democracy. Besides it is not like the peoples house is going to be much of a forum for debate over the next four years.

I figure Blogs are akin to conversations. People get to read my thoughts and respond creating a two way conversation. I am looking forward to not just putting my thoughts on the Web but receiving feedback from others with similar interests. It is going to be a great way to learn and widen my perspective. Polemic & Paradox will evolve as time goes by and cover a variety of topics. I expect that much of the focus will be on contemporary political issues and other things that I find interesting.

While I have never been shy about posting my opinions in newspapers, talk shows or newsgroups, joining the blogosphere has caused me some anxiety. Something about putting it out there to the wide world. Which is strange because it seems like a natural fit for me? I am looking forward to positing my opinions as opposed to deleting them after they were composed.

Passion yes, but never passion without logic!

Stay tuned!