Rodney fiddles while Nova Scotia gets burned

This is not the first time, of course, that I’ve paid attention to the relative importance of the visual image over the written word. Seasoned television journalists know that, in TV coverage, it’s not really what they say, but the visual backdrop in front of which they say it.

With this in mind, Rodney and Peter have to be thinking that it has been a bad week, although Peter seemed to understand what was happening to him while Rodney was blissful in his handlers’ incredibly thin sense of subtext.

Peter’s visual this week - one that we will remember for some time - was of him standing in the House, voting to end the Atlantic Accord. It doesn’t really matter, in symbolic politics, whether or not he had good reasons to believe that in the end Nova Scotia would be better off; whether or not the offshore will turn out to be a primarily Newfoundland bonanza; whether or not he was working some side deal.

The words and analysis don’t matter. It was Peter MacKay standing up against his Province in the House that lodges in our minds.

He didn’t have much of a choice. To have voted for it would have cost him a Cabinet post and perhaps his standing in the Tory caucus. Of course, he could have crossed the floor, but somehow I just can’t see Peter and Scott standing side-by-side again.

Rodney’s visual moment, on the other hand, was totally avoidable. In the very week that Moirs workers were in total despair about what they were going to do after the EI payments stopped; when Trenton workers were well into the full realization that their lives may never be the same; and when farmers in the Valley were dumping hogs; Rodney was photographed playing fiddle with the boys. Now Nova Scotia is no Rome, but you gotta think that an educator would be alert to the historical subtext.

I do feel badly for our Premier. He’s leading a minority government where he can’t afford really to introduce many of his own ideas. He’s governing a province that’s so deeply in debt that only the conviction to social justice is sufficient to cause the best of our fellow and sister citizens to run for office.

He’s being badly undermined by his “friends” in Ottawa and he’ll likely be out of office by the time the offshore treasure, if there is to be one, comes our way. What’s a guy to do?

Lightbulb idea is just goofy

Two things he has decided to do this week seem to be – well - less than inspired. Giving two lightbulbs to those in Metro, leaving the rest of us in the dark, is hardly a commitment to global environmentalism, and the $240,000 he spent would have bought a lot of meals at the food bank.

And while a chicken in every pot might once have worked, a lightbulb in every Metro home is just goofy. Moreover, being associated with a lightbulb might invite your harsher critics to wonder when the Tory lightbulbs will finally turn on.

The second idea was to move to deny the right to strike to health care workers. Much here will turn on the sort of legislation that the Tories produce. But we haven’t seen much in the way of health care workers using the right to strike against the interests of their patients, and moving against them now will seem gratuitous.

Moverover, as many of the spokespersons for this sector are women, the visuals that Rod is creating will render him as not all that keen on the advancement of women in the province.

Still, there’s decent work available for the Premier. To begin, down this way, he needs to negotiate a deal now with the Feds to twin the 101 through Falmouth and Windsor and proceed with it directly.

He needs to follow the lead of David Morse, who has apparently pushed to see the Hantsport/Avonport part of the road completed. MacDonald knows these are dollars that are committed already, so why not just spend them? He might save some lives in doing so and he could at least have a visual that’d work for him as he cuts the ribbon.