Recently tagged Tim Powers

Quite a few political watchers in Newfoundland and Labrador were bemused when a website launched last week aimed at drafting Tim Powers as the successor to Danny Williams. Powers has two key ingredients for a leadership candidate - he’s from here, he’s conservative - but he doesn’t have the high profile of other contenders, including Jerome Kennedy or Tom Marshall.

Powers, who works in Ottawa and is frequently seen on the political chat circuit, is extraordinarily well-connected, and has a wide circle of friends and contacts, including us in the media. [You can follow him on Twitter here.] He told us this week he was “very flattered and overwhelmed” by the online draft movement, but was coy about what his next move might be.

“I’m just in a sort of quiet listening reflective mode but I’m not about to make any announcements or do anything dramatic at the moment.”

The picture above, by the way, is from 1999 - and from a period that Powers would probably like to forget. You may recall that Powers quit as the campaign manager for Paul Brown in St. John’s Centre in that election during the Brian Tobin juggernaut; Brown, and the party, cut Powers loose after it was revealed he had leaked a note with disparaging accusations about Liberal candidate Mary Hodder.

Mind you, that was more than a decade ago, and it’s far more likely that if there is skepticism about Powers locally, it’s because he was on the other side of the ABC campaign that Danny Williams launched leading up to the 2007 federal election.

Then again, there has been a very noticeable detente between the provincial PCs and the federal Conservatives. It’ll be really interesting to see how federal Tories like Powers fit into a post-Danny PC party.