It seemed like a good idea at the time.
According to various news reports, Halifax Liberals planned to gather Wednesday evening (Sept 10) to officially crown Catherine Meade as their candidate in Halifax.
I should go, I thought.
I first checked out the Liberal party’s provincial and national websites, but there was no information on either about the whens and wheres of the federal nominating meeting.
So I plugged Meade’s name in my trusty Google search engine. Et voila—a website cutely titled “meade4halifax.com”. The home page featured a photo of a smiling Meade posed with a sort-of-smiling Stephane Dion.
This must be the place.
Better, there was a prominent link announcing “Nomination Meeting.” I clicked on it and discovered that the meeting was being held at St. Agnes Church Hall at the corner of Mumford and Chebucto Roads. Registration beginning at 6 p.m., meeting at seven. Special gust speaker: Martha Hall Findlay.
At the appointed hour, I made my way to the location.
There were only a dozen cars in the parking lot. Strange, I thought. Then I discovered that the door to the church hall was… locked. Uh oh.
Surely, the Liberals couldn’t be holding their nomination inside the… Quietly, carefully, I poked my head in through the church doors “…And forgive those who trespass against us as we forgive them…” came the rote recitation from the small group assembled in the corner. I had stumbled into a church prayer meeting! Could it be a Liberal prayer meeting? It wasn’t. Excuse me…
Thinking I may have misread the website instruction, I decided to make a quick trip to the nearby St. Agnes school to see if the Liberals were meeting in the auditorium there instead. But the school parking lot was even emptier than the one at the church.
Defeated, I went home and looked up the web page again. What I hadn’t noticed was the date for the meeting: April 3! April 3?
It turned out, as I discovered when I finally managed to contact Meade’s PR spokesperson, Nancy Sheppard, that the website I’d found was from her last, unsuccessful attempt to win the nomination for the federal election two years ago. That website hadn’t yet been taken down and her new website wasn’t quite ready to post.
Ooops.
Last night’s nomination meeting had indeed taken place, but at Bethany United Church in another part of town.
So, I wondered, how did it go? “It was a great event,” Sheppard assured me. One hundred-plus people. Federal Liberal MPs Mike Savage and Geoff Regan both gave great speeches and Meade herself “did awesome.”
I guess I’ll have to take her word for it. I wasn’t there. And there were no reports of the meeting in this morning’s Chronicle Herald. Could it be that the province’s newspaper of record wasn’t prepared to pay a reporter overtime to cover Meade’s uncontested nomination? Just asking.
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2008.