Its the voters, not the Constitution, that will doom McNeil’s Liberals on SPREE KILLING inquiry

Mr Dooley, if he returned today, would modify his most famous saying.

Now it would be : “The Constitution”, he’d declare in his best Roscommon accent, “ th’ constitution  is always trumped by the poll results.”

And if Teflon John returned today, he’d have one word for PC leader Tim Houston : “forget Power Rates, think Portapique.”

”Up dale and down hill in rural Nova Scotia, just like I did Tim, till the next election, with but one promise : ‘if I am elected your Premier, the first thing I will do will be to hold a Public Inquiry into the Portapique Killings’”.

If on the heart of Queen Mary were engraved Calais, and engraved upon the heart of Gerald Regan, Power Rates, upon the heart of Stephen McNeil will be engraved Portapique.

I saw John Buchanan in action in some of the backwaters of Nova Scotia where the Halifax-based media was afraid to go and he was devastating.

From then, I told everybody and anybody from the three big parties that John was going to cream Jerry as soon as the election was called - they didn’t believe me right up to election day (hello Rollie Thornhill).

Only Jerry Regan advisor Harry Fleming, God Bless him, believed me and he plastered my prediction on the front page of his Barometer newspaper a week before the election : and I was bang on, within a seat or two.

I had no insider knowledge that September 1978, I had just seen the response from rural voters to John Buchanan’s Power Rate speeches, on two occasions in Cumberland County in December 1976 —- but that was enough.

Stephen McNeil is currently in a conflict of interest you could drive a fake cop car through.

He has a half dozen close relatives who were working for the HRM police during the 20 years of interactions between the force and Gabriel Wortman : some at the very top of the operational police command structure.

So, yes, a Public Inquiry might drag the McNeil family honour through the public mud.

But those brothers slash officers must live up to their past decisions.

But Stephen McNeil did nothing wrong in those twenty years.

It is only his post-shooting behaviour : it is so bizarre and so lacking any political common sense that it will doom him and his party.

Let your brothers swing for it, Stephen, and hold the Public Inquiry : sacrifice your bros and save the party....