That time Ross Wiseman learned how Facebook works
It’s standard practice that when a new party takes over a government, things change. Some shifts are dramatic and soon, and others take a while.
On Thursday, three months and a week after ousting the Liberals in the Newfoundland and Labrador general election, the Tory government led by Premier Tony Wakeham made a significant move on health care, by far the greatest source of public spending. (It’s now about 40 per cent.)
In a shakeup of the Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services, the mega health board that runs the hospitals, many nursing homes and many health-care services, the government showed Dr. Patrick Parfrey the door as CEO.
The government has installed Ron Johnson as interim CEO while a search presumably is underway for a permanent replacement.
It’s not the only change announced Thursday. Ross Wiseman, a former PC cabinet minister, is now the interim chair of the NLHS board of trustees. His appointment is evidently significant to the government; about 190 words of the 523 words of the government news release are about Wiseman.
The appointment prompted political watcher John Riche this morning to make a crack on Facebook, that Parfrey was being replaced by a “former MHA who once kicked another MHA out of the house as speaker because he didn’t understand how facebook worked?” (John corrected his post to note that the former MHA, as he calls Wiseman, is not the new CEO, but is looking after the board of trustees.)
Riche’s post brought to mind a curious bit of political theatre that rolled out in the spring of 2013. Here’s what happened.
Wiseman, who had been health minister in the latter Danny Williams era, was at the time the Speaker of the House of Assembly. He threw NDP MHA Gerry Rogers out of the legislature when she refused to apologize for a Facebook post that was critical of then-premier Kathy Dunderdale.
The key detail: the comments had been written and posted by someone else. Not only that, it was in a Facebook group, and Rogers had been added to the group without her consent.
By 2013, we were a good few years into the Facebook phenomenon, and you would think that basic things — like, you know, how Facebook groups work — would be common knowledge. But they evidently were not.
Out Rogers went from the house. As I recall, not a few jaws dropped.
After some ranking Tories doubled down to wag their fingers to others to mind their social media practices, it quickly emerged that Dunderdale herself was following a X-rated Twitter account that hosted porn videos. (It emerged, by the way, because reporters decided to take a closer look at such accounts.) When news of that broke, Dunderdale shut her account down altogether.
Within a week of the Rogers fuss, Wiseman backed down, and apologized to the house for finding Rogers in contempt.
“Since making this ruling, I have become aware of considerably more information regarding the complexities of social media,” Wiseman told the legislature.