The past is present in NS cabinet shuffle

Whoa. Flashback.

All that was old is new again, freshened by the mundane act of shuffling the provincial cabinet to add a chair for a former Tory MLA turned Liberal minister following his requisite time in political purgatory, also known as the government backbench.

A Liberal, after all, is just a Tory whose only priority is winning, and Premier Stephen McNeil now has a brace of those reconditioned right-wingers with him when the executive council meets, as it does only occasionally in the good old summertime.

Joining cabinet is G. Chuck Porter, thrice elected as a Progressive Conservative in the Hants West seat Ron Russell owned for most living memory and could still, had he not decided that 30-years-a-member and eight successive electoral victories was sufficient even for a fighter pilot.

Porter joins his former PC caucus colleague Karen Casey in McNeil’s Gritty cabinet. Casey won two elections as a Tory and two as a Liberal in Colchester North, where party mattered little until the Liberals decided gold mining was a good idea in the hills that separate the north shore from Truro and the Bay of Fundy. It seems unlikely Casey will seek another term, but if she does, all her aisle-crossing wiles will be required to straddle that issue.

It was the resurrection of the long dead but never forgotten department of lands and forests that stirred nos- talgia than neuralgia when the new name penetrated the cerebral cortex. Lands and Forestry, it is called, leaving no doubt that the provincial government sees no conceivable purpose for a tree other than its eventual removal for monetary gain.

The last Liberal minister of lands and forests was Vince MacLean, who stared down the big forest companies and refused to allow aerial pesticide spraying in the Cape Breton Highlands. That was 1977-78 but should the present government face a similar decision, Cabot Trail hikers could emerge from the woods with the glow of luminescent chemical dust.

McNeil also reunited mines and energy but reversed the order so the old department – it was mines and energy from 1979 to 1991 – has a new-sounding name, Energy and Mines.

The premier decided to flip back the calendar on personnel, too. He put Margaret Miller back in environment for no better reason than there is still some old letterhead left over from a year back when she left the job.

Iain Rankin, who represents a suburban Halifax seat moved to Lands and Forestry where degrees from the University of New Brunswick will again hold sway and their holders will have the city boy confusing hemlock for decaf in no time.

The would-be leaders of Nova Scotia’s official opposition party – the Tories – wasted no time wading in on the premier’s lacklustre shuffle back in time, and to the credit of all, none referred to deck chairs on the Titanic.

All agreed that against a backdrop of the province’s real problems – in health, education, and public alienation from government – the cabinet shuffle was meaningless.

Cecil Clarke, the mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality noted that McNeil threw a political lifeline to Sydney Whitney-Pier MLA Derek Mombourquette who was drowning in a sea of unresolved issues on the home front as municipal affairs minister, but those issues will remain unresolved with Chuck Porter in the portfolio. Mombourquette took over Energy and Mines.

Pictou East Tory Tim Houston wondered why the premier would bother shuffling a cabinet and not address its most glaring problems, like Internal Services Minister Patricia Arab, whose department fumbled badly when faced with a possible online security breach. The minister and premier were only saved from the fallout of their mishandling of that issue by the end of the spring session of the legislature.

John Lohr (PC-Kings North) said the government needs to get smaller not bigger, a sentiment echoed by Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, who said the shuffle doesn’t address any of the issues Nova Scotians care about most.

In the final analysis, it is a shuffle back to the future, designed to try and shore up a couple of shaky Liberal seats. One key audience that was sullen in silence was the group of life-long Liberals who, until last Thursday, shared the backbench with lapsed Tory Chuck Porter. What message do they take away? Wait your turn. Hunker down for the long haul. It pays to cross the aisle.

The premier, with a two-seat majority, needs to hope his backbench seats a patient bunch. Two defections and Nova Scotia embraces yet another recent tradition – minority government.