Head Tale

I was Googling around looking for something else the other day and stumbled upon this article from Global News from after the Spring Session of the Legislature last May where Global gave letter grades to some of the most high profile Ministers and MLA’s in both parties.

I took away a few things from this article:
1) I wouldn’t want to have Global as my teacher as their marks were tough across the board! 🙂

2) Many observers are saying that there is very little light between Ryan Meili and Trent Wotherspoon and both would be fine choices as Leader for the NDP.  The fact that they both received the same grade would seem to reinforce that idea.

3) At the same time, one of the big advantages Wotherspoon supporters tout that their candidate has over Meili is Trent’s decade of experience as an MLA.  Given that experience (and the fact that he had a much higher profile as Interim Leader when this story came out), I would’ve expected Wotherspoon to get a higher grade than Meili.  That’s not the case and shows that Meili, as a raw rookie MLA, was matching up pretty well with a much more experienced colleague.  To put it another way, imagine what Trent’s grade might’ve been in 2007 when he was first elected and how that might compare with the grade Meili might’ve gotten after 10 years as an MLA, especially if he’d had a brief period as interim leader!

“[Meili] didn’t come across as a rookie, I think he had a fairly strong performance given that there’s a lot of attention focused on him, rightly or wrongly,” Rasmussen said.

4) I guess the final thing I noticed is that this article came out when Trent was still the Interim Leader and hadn’t yet changed his mind to decide to run for the permanent job. So a lot of the article focused on how Meili was performing compared to other potential leadership candidates – Carla Beck, Nicole Sarauer (who eventually replaced Wotherspoon as Interim Leader) – but with no mention of Wotherspoon as a potential candidate at all.

The article said those other relatively new MLAs were, like Meili, performing quite well also which reinforces my belief that there was a path for a third candidate to run and “come up the middle” between Wotherspoon and Meili.

Too late for that now but fun to speculate how this race would’ve been different if Beck or Sarauer had entered the race as well.

(Of course, given the NDP’s track record at picking a successful leader the last two chances, who knows – maybe if they don’t make the right choice this time around, we’ll have another leadership race after 2020 and then we’ll have a chance to find out!) 🙁