Wasted days

Eddie Joyce will not agree, but Eddie Joyce should let it go.

At least as far as the House of Assembly is concerned.

Joyce, an independent MHA, is upset — and has been upset now for years — over his treatment following allegations of bullying and harassment, which first lost him a cabinet seat and then saw him tossed from the Liberal caucus.

He’s consistently questioned the way the complaint was handled and the fairness of an investigation of his conduct by the commissioner of legislative standards, Bruce Chaulk. Chaulk found Joyce to have broken the MHA code of conduct over trying to get a friend hired for a government job.

Now, Joyce is suing Chaulk, Premier Dwight Ball, former Speaker of the House Perry Trimper and MHA Sherry Gambin-walsh for defamation, asking for $400,000. (It’s a lawsuit he warned about in the House on March 9 when he said about Premier Ball, “I have to go to court now to find out what his involvement was.”)

Joyce is, of course, welcome to his day in court, as everyone is. (Everyone who can afford the expensive and lengthy process, that is).

But now that Joyce has started the court process, he should stop his full-court press in the legislature.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s House of Assembly has been in session for only 36 days since the last provincial election.

Joyce has raised concerns about his own treatment on 10 of those days — often at length.

I’ve gone back through all 36 days of Hansard. By my count — and I may be short, because sometimes he’s not completely clear about what he’s referring to — Joyce has spoken 39,184 words in the House on the subject of his own mistreatment.

To put that in perspective, Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Old Man and the Sea” is 128 pages long — and comes in at 26,601 words. George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was 29,966 words. (There are more than 331,000 words in “Don Quixote,” which sadly also might be important here. More on that later.)

So, Joyce has done the equivalent of reading an entire moderate-length novel out loud to the House of Assembly.

An entire novel on the topic of … Eddie Joyce.

He says he’s doing it because that’s what he promised his constituents he would do during the last election. Not a whole lot has been done to slow his single-minded fixation on the topic. The Ball government, after all, is a minority one, and the exiled Joyce is a key vote when things get sticky for the Liberals on anything that could be considered a vote of confidence.

Opposition parties don’t seem to have a problem with the disruption either — the endless churn of the Liberals’ internal dirty laundry probably doesn’t help the opposition much politically, but it’s not harming them either.

What it is doing is showing that a determined provocateur can put a big stick in the legislative spokes of government — and in Newfoundland and Labrador, where there’s a history of legislation dawdling along until it’s crampacked through without much analysis in the last few hours of the last few days of every legislative session — it means less time to actually examine laws before they’re put on the books.

It’s painfully clear that Joyce will not find his exoneration in the House of Assembly. As an exasperated Speaker of the House put it, way back on June 25, 2019: “Order, please! Your time has expired, definitely expired.”

Take it to the courts if you will, Mr. Joyce, but it’s time to stop wasting the time of the House of Assembly on a hopeless crusade.

Will he?

The sad fact is that Newfoundland and Labrador’s political Don Quixote is probably already lining his horse up to attack the windmill yet again.