With only a week to go, no one specific issue has dominated the election campaign so far. The party leaders have combined their pronouncements at campaign stops and rallies about local interests with explanations and defences of their party policies in several issue areas.

However, no one particular issue or policy has really sparked public debate or interest. Furthermore, the party leaders seem to be interpreting their policy platforms as the campaign progresses. This makes examining the details of policy positions as much an exercise in semantics as it is in policy analysis.

For example, Liberal leader Roger Grimes announced on the weekend that, if elected, a Liberal government would undertake a comprehensive review of municipalities. That his announcement came at the annual convention of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Municipalities, which has been strongly advocating a new royal commission on municipal government, is, I’m sure, just a coincidence. However, there is no comprehensive review spelled out in the Liberal’s policy book which only promises to “work with” municipal governments and the federation to “improve the financial viability of local governments.”

The Progressive Conservatives propose to use the fact that 25 per cent of public servants will retire over the next five years as an opportunity to reduce the civil service through attrition. This has led to charges that the Tories plan to cut the civil service by 25 per cent with a commensurate cut in services. This is not what the ‘blue book’ says, but the voter cannot know whether Danny Williams plans to cut the civil service by five per cent, 10 percent, or 50 per cent. I suspect that Williams doesn’t know either, and won’t until his government, if elected, is able to undertake a thorough review of existing staff and services.

So, while the ‘devil may be in the details,’ we are going to have to wait until after the election to see what those details are – no matter which party forms the government. In the meantime, the election campaigns continue unabated.

Defending the indefensible

One very unsettling aspect of the Liberal campaign last week was Roger Grimes’ defence of St. Barbe candidate Ralph Payne’s conviction for defrauding the federal government. While it might be reasonable for Grimes to argue that Payne had paid the penalty for his crime and should therefore not be barred from seeking elected office, for Grimes to portray it in a positive light is astonishing.

Grimes’ argument that Employment Insurance fraud is acceptable if done to help fellow residents speaks volumes about his morality, ethics, and fitness to be premier. No wonder he put off calling the election as long as he dared. According to Grimes, Payne “wanted to help the people…and they appreciated it very much.” I’ll bet they did, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

In the 1999 provincial election, then-Progressive Conservative leader Ed Byrne was embarrassed by revelations that his party’s would-be candidate in Torngat Mountains had a prior conviction for fraud and that the signatures on her nomination papers were forged. Byrne’s action in immediately refusing to sign her nomination papers stands in stark contrast to Grimes’ ‘defence of the indefensible.’

Ever since Joey Smallwood’s day, politicians in this province have creatively used Unemployment Insurance to shift as much of the cost of supporting seasonal workers from the provincial to federal budget as they could. Fair enough. But until now, no political leader has actually defended fraud as a legitimate means of getting federal funding and voter support.

Spending boasts and buying votes

The line between buying votes and being a good constituency representative is not always clear. Consider Topsail MHA Ralph Wiseman’s ad in The Shoreline about the $131 million he claims to have brought to the district since 1996. Is the implication supposed to be that he is personally responsible for all of the water and sewer projects, school construction and repair, sports and recreation facilities, and student employment programs and that voters should therefore reward him accordingly? Or is the implication that if a Progressive Conservative had represented the district that the funding wouldn’t have been received?

Not to be outdone, his opponent, Progressive Conservative Elizabeth Marshall, promises in an ad on the opposite page of the same paper to “reinvest and refocus” on essentially the same list of projects outlined by Mr. Wiseman. Mind you, she also promises to restore integrity and accountability to government, so if she is elected, we should presumably not expect an ad in four years time trumpeting how much money she has brought to the district.

Or, perhaps, the old saying that “politics is the art of making yourself popular with people by giving them grants out of their own money” really is true. Of course, governments have to spend taxpayers’ money in providing roads, schools, recreation facilities, education, healthcare, and a myriad of other things essential to the operation of modern society, but it’s the whole aura of linking spending with voting that I find unsettling.

Even Tory leader Danny Williams found himself suspected of trying to buy votes this past weekend by donating his own money to a firefighting support charity in Bay Roberts. The personal donation may have been made with the purest of intention, but the optics was wrong and may have cost Williams some of the positive capital he earned in his deft handling of the ‘write me a cheque and I’ll vote for you’ incident in Lewisporte.

This coming final week in the campaign will undoubtedly see increased scrutiny of party leaders and their policies – perhaps even some that aren’t included in their campaign platforms. Our next column will look at some of these missing policies.

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