December 13, 2017: Hannah Bell/Sidney MacEwan & Robert Henderson (Protecting Records; Health PEI Meetings)
READ THE SHORT ARTICLE FOR CONTEXT – THEN WATCH THE VIDEO
Thanks for tuning in to “Great Question – No Answer,” the Facebook Game Show that takes place in beautiful down-town Charlottetown in the Coles building, where PEI’s Legislative Assembly gathers – an old stone government building that has miraculously cut its carbon foot-print by half IN A SINGLE DAY by becoming twice as green as it was yesterday!
And with that in mind, today’s “Great Question” Award goes to the newly-instated Green Party MLA from Charlottetown-Parkdale, Hannah Bell, who spoke eloquently, with passion, and with clarity about the urgent need for government to act on the Auditor General’s insistence that all text messages constituting official government records be preserved and stored in the government archives [something that didn’t happen with e-gaming].
In the interest of keeping the clip short, I’ve excluded Hon. Jordan Brown’s responses which can be summed up as follows: “You’re correct Hannah….and we’re working on it.”
The “No Answer” Award once again goes to Minister of Health, Hon. Robert Henderson for his wordy responses to essentially the same question asked several times in several ways by Sidney MacEwen : Namely, whether his government would make Health PEI meetings open to the public. It would be easy to do so now, since that legislation is about to be amended for other reasons, and that change could be made as well when it comes on the floor of the House. Henderson’s answer? “No answer”….a few times.
Henderson got some nice bonus points for his very clever mispronunciation – in this short clip, but also a few other times as well – of the key term “remuneration” [money paid for work or a service] by repeatedly saying either “re-numeration” [to renumber a bunch of stuff] or “enumeration” [to mention a bunch of stuff “item by item”] but never “remuneration.” By astutely doing this and appearing to “play dumb,” Henderson has retained his legal right to swear an oath that he never actually said “remuneration” at all [“Check Hansard,” I can hear his lawyer say]…that is, if the matter should ever go to court.