NJN Network

PEI Tourism, drifting until we drown

Businessman Kevin Murphy will stick up for her

By Stephen Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada February 20, 2009

Why are we paying Valerie Docherty a minister’s salary and expense account, allowing her to fool around with tax payers money only to have Kevin Murphy appear before the Public Accounts Committee? There is no doubt that Valerie has been hiding from the Public Accounts, the press and everyone with those lies about where she is. I’m at the doctors office every Wednesday. No I’m in the Dominican Republic. Give Murphy her job and send her back to the secretarial pool where she has a level of incompetence.

It’s quite a cosy little circle this group. Myrtle Jenkins-Smith, the original Liberal Millionaires Club, is close friends with Kevin Murphy and Tourism Minister Valerie Docherty so he can do that “one lies and the other swears to it” song and dance. Myrtle is the one who screwed up the Alanis Morissette concert and Valerie just had to bail her friend out because, well that’s what friends are for. Uncle Kevin will say those smooth words and make it all seem like a bedtime story.

The incompetence at Tourism has been going on for decades, ever since we exported Harvey Sawler to New Brunswick. Sawler was and still is a first class marketing guru who was trying to bring modern marketing to our Tourism sector 20 years ago. We sent him to NB because the civil servants and politicians knew more. Harvey helped created a billion dollar business for New Brunswick with modern marketing. How he did that with a province so plumb ugly we used just drive through? Sawler was a genius. Sawler was a proponent of branding, as in what’s your brand. Like Coke is it, and the Pepsi Generation.

We are still struggling on PEI with absurd changes in branding every year. There is no leadership at the top. Are the we the Gentle Island of Rejuvenation or Anne’s Land, or Cradled in the Waves? The Sunny Bee juice commercial, the one with the kids playing on a PEI beach, is better than anything we have to portray the summer fun of PEI but that would be too simple. Poor Valerie is just another in the long line of incompetent ministers with incompetent leadership.

Maybe Kevin Murphy would take it over but not likely. He’s making too much money being PEI’s restaurant Czar. We’ll just drift like a little dory cradled in the waves a little longer, until we drown.

Late news: Rumor has it that Kevin Murphy is part of a group selected by Valerie Docherty to produce a major concert this summer. Another Liberal insider with no experience in the concert promotion business. I smell another Alanis debacle. Anyone going to see Kiss in Halifax?