The Tale of Loyola Sullivan - and Danny's Team

Danny surrounds himself with the best people. That's what he says.

When the PC's were in Opposition Ed Byrne and Loyola Sullivan were like Danny's pit bulls - attack when they were tormented or challenged.

Sullivan would go on and on about financial mismanagement - bad deals - inappropriate spending like travelling with spouses. Sullivan would speak endlessly to budgets and publicly review the Auditor General's reports.

Do you remember when the House of Assembly fired Frasier March? These holier than thou MHA's passing judgement on others and their poor accounting methods.

Then Loyola's party won and they were government. He ended up with his dream job - Minister of Finance. He then began the "preach" of fiscal management - accrual accounting - tightening the belt - spend only what we have to spend.

He tortured citizens with decade old school tax accounts - with compounding interest. He was holding the Premier's fiscal hand when public servants hit the streets and then threatened to legislate them back. We just don't have the money he'd say - we are almost bankrupt.

That's when Loyola should have brought in a Chartered Accountant and asked - if we are almost bankrupt what should we spend the little money we have on. I bet he/she would not have said Seasons Tickets to the St. John's Maple Leafs.

Then there was the Premier - going off his head at the mere mention that Loyola Sullivan might appear to be in conflict of interest when Cabinet discussed the RMS system for the fishery or the sale of FPI (parts of which did end up under a couple of his brothers). Do you remember Danny saying - how dare you question the integrity of somebody like Loyola Sullivan. The man's reputation is impeccable.

Then we move to Loyola "knockout punch" Sullivan who took on the feds over equalization and won. He took on the mean old Liberals and brought home the bacon. Remember him standing next to Williams - puffed up with pride. Well that fellow has ended up taking an appointment from Newfoundland and Labrador's mortal enemy - Stephen Harper - while running away from the FPI fiasco - the Auditor General's latest expose and yet to come report on the fibre-optical illusion. Where is Loyola now that Harper has lied to us about equalization? Not a peep from Sullivan.

To top it all off - the big spending scandal - the one which resulted in criminal charges - took place during a time where Sullivan was the longest continuous sitting member of the Internal Economy Committee.

Where is he now? He's now named in the latest AG's report as being one of only 9 MHA's who had not paid back or made arrangements to pay back the $2875 special payment - by August 16 of this year.

He is named for buying season hockey tickets for the St. John's Maple Leafs from his constituency allowance. $4800 + $1000 to Mile One.

Now can those of you looking for potential life saving drugs - or a house without mold - or a retired public servant looking for indexing really blame the "scrooge" for wanting some hockey tickets? As you pay back your thousands of dollars in interest on a school tax bill of a couple of hundred - remember the drop of the puck at Mile One.

So Danny's two "best of" team members should make you question if Danny has a problem in identifying the "best we have" for things like the Lower Churchill development or the spending of 15 million to Persona to lease some strands.

True it was not Danny Williams that did these things - but he picked these two as his lead team members.