Sorry for the gap!

 Since my last posting on this blog, an awful lot has happened... including the postponing of "election day" to 5 March, and a series of short-lived decisions by the Chief Returning Officer to first cancel in-person voting for the Avalon peninsula districts, then a change of deadline for requests for special ballots from Friday 12 February to Monday 15 February, and then the cancellation of all in-person voting in the province (the latter caused by a widespread withdrawal of services by poll workers), then a change of deadline date for requesting special ballots to Friday 19 February and for receipt of said ballots to 5 March at 8pm.

The reaction from the public has not been good, especially since the single phone-line into the CRO's office and its single voice mailbox could not cope with the number of calls, and its website crashed for similar reasons. The response from the CRO was slow, but eventually a call-centre was set up, more staff hired to deal with the backlog, and two additional numbers for people to call were installed. The whole mess was complicated by a staff member testing positive for COVID, necessitating a comprehensive deep clean of the premises and some staff being required to self-isolate.

All of this could have been avoided by better planning by the CRO, and by the Liberal leader Andrew Furey resisting the temptation to call the election in February when he thought he could avoid the bad news anticipated from the Greene report, preliminary at the end of February, definitive in April, and the budget which was scheduled I think for some time in May.

As for my campaign, it was boosted by donations from friends and the Federation of Labour to the point where I was able to spend some time in the Harbour Main district doing some door-to-door canvassing. Not as much as I would have liked... We hired a car on Monday 8 February, only to have our departure delayed by a snowstorm. But we were able to leave (Heather, my wife and Chief Financial Officer and driver) on Tuesday morning, spending the rest of daylight hours in Upper Gullies, the eastern-most end of the district, before checking in at Comerford's Guest Suites in Holyrood. Wednesday I canvassed again, this time in Chapel's Cove and Harbour Main, where I bumped into Hugh McGettigan, an old friend from Philharmonic Choir, and John Joy, a former judge in Labrador, who had retired to his family's historical home. 

Thursday 11 February saw another snowstorm that kept us in the motel. However, that did give me time to prepare for an evening zoom meeting with the Holyrood town council, who had sent me six questions which pertained primarily to their local concerns. I was able to do a little research about ambulance service in the district, with an illustration of statistics gathered in St John's for 2020. There had been 2000 code-red situations (sub-standard response time) of which 475 had received no response or were "pending", i.e. caller was kept on hold, the call dropped. I was able to point to a 2013 consultants' report dealing with the whole of the island portion of the province, which had been submitted to government in 2015 and which had received no action.

We returned to St John's on Friday 12 February in time to learn of the unfolding chaos detailed at the start of this blog.

Since I don't have a good list of supporters (as gathered in previous elections) - phone numbers are "not-in-service", or the person is now deceased, or the person does not understand why he/she is on the list since they have been a Liberal/Conservative supporter all their life - I have not been able to continue my campaign via social media, apart from generic statements about the various (changing) deadlines. So now, I just sit and wait. All I can hope is that via the little bit of canvassing I did, the two zoom meetings that the organizers have posted on their respective websites, and the few posters I managed to stick around the district, there will be enough name recognition that when people have to write in my name on their postal ballots I will receive enough votes to reclaim my deposit.